He tried to sit up, winced and let himself fall back against the sofa. “I should’ve known you’d find someone to hang out of your arse. Now Kevin’s not around to do it.”
I said, “Is it going to make you feel better if I get into a bitch fight with you? Because if it is, I’ll go nuts, but I would’ve thought we were a few steps past the point where it would make any difference.”
Shay swiped at his mouth with his cuffed hands and examined the streaks of blood on them with a kind of strange, detached interest, like they belonged to someone else. He said, “You’re actually going to do this.”
Downstairs a door opened, letting out a burst of overlapping voices, and Ma yelled, “Seamus! Francis! Your dinner’s nearly ready. Come down here and wash your hands!”
I leaned out onto the landing, keeping an eagle eye on Shay and staying a safe distance from the stairwell and Ma’s line of vision. “We’ll be down in a minute, Ma. Just having a chat.”
“Yous can chat here! Or do you want everyone to sit around the table and wait till it suits you?”
I dropped my voice a notch and put a pained twist on it. “We’re just… We both really need to talk. About stuff, you know. Could we take just a few minutes, Mammy? Would that be all right?”
A pause. Then, grudgingly: “Go on, then. It’ll keep an extra ten minutes. If yous aren’t down by then-”
“Thanks, Mammy. Seriously. You’re a star.”
“Course I am, when he wants something I’m a star, the rest of the time…” Her voice faded back into the flat, still grumbling.
I shut the door, shot the bolt just in case, got out my phone and took photos of both our faces from various artistic angles. Shay asked, “Proud of your work?”
“It’s a thing of beauty. And I’ve got to hand it to you, yours isn’t half bad either. This isn’t for my scrapbook, though. It’s just in case you decide to start whining about police brutality and trying to dump the arresting officer in the shite, somewhere down the line. Say cheese.” He gave me a look that could have flayed a rhino at ten paces.
Once I had the gist of things on record, I headed for the kitchen-small, bare, immaculate and depressing-and soaked a J-cloth to clean the pair of us up with. Shay jerked his head away from it. “Get off. Let your mates see what you did, if you’re so proud of it.”
I said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about my mates. They’ve seen me do a lot worse. But in a few minutes’ time they’re going to be walking you down those stairs and up the Place, and it had occurred to me that the entire neighborhood doesn’t need to know what’s going on here. I’m just trying to keep the drama to a minimum. If that’s not your style, by all means let me know and I’ll be happy to give you another clatter or two, for top-up.”
Shay didn’t answer that, but he shut his gob and stayed still while I finished wiping the blood off his face. The flat was quiet, just a faint snatch of music I couldn’t place coming from somewhere and a restless wind wandering through the eaves above us. I couldn’t remember ever looking this closely at Shay before, close enough to take in all the details that only parents and lovers ever bother to see: the clean savage curves of his bones under the skin, the first speckle of five o’clock shadow, the intricate patterns his crow’s-feet made and how thick his lashes were. The blood had started crusting dark on his chin and around his mouth. For a strange second I caught myself being gentle.
There wasn’t much I could do about the black eyes or the lump on his jaw, but when I was done he was at least a few steps closer to presentable. I refolded the J-cloth and went at my own face. “How’s that?”
He barely glanced at me. “You’re grand.”
“If you say so. Like I said, it’s no skin off my nose what the Place sees.”
That made him take a proper look. After a moment he jabbed a finger, almost reluctantly, at the corner of his mouth. “There.”
I gave my cheek another scrub and raised an eyebrow at him. He nodded.
“OK,” I said. The cloth was smeared with great spreading splotches of blood, blooming crimson all over again where the water had revived them, soaking through the folds. It was starting to come off on my hands. “OK. Hang on there a sec.”
“Like I’ve a choice.”
I rinsed the cloth a bunch of times in the kitchen sink, tossed it in the bin for the search team to find later on, and scrubbed my hands hard. Then I went back out to the front room. The ashtray was under a chair in a scatter of gray ash, my smokes were in a corner and Shay was where I had left him. I sat down on the floor opposite him, like we were a couple of teenagers at a party, and put the ashtray between us. I lit two smokes and stuck one between his lips.
Shay inhaled hard, eyes closing, and let his head fall back on the sofa. I leaned back against the wall. After a while he asked, “Why didn’t you shoot me?”
“Are you complaining?”
“Don’t be a bleeding sap. I’m only asking.”
