“Mammy, not Ma. You go find your brother, and the two of yous go in and help your father get out here for the dinner, before you have it burnt to a crisp with your dawdling. Go on!”
“Ma. Holly and I have to go.”
Ma’s jaw dropped. For a second there, she was actually speechless. Then she went off like an air-raid siren. “Francis Joseph Mackey! You’re joking me. You tell me this minute that you’re joking me.”
“Sorry, Ma. I got talking to Shay, lost track of time, you know how it goes. Now we’re running late. We need to head.”
Ma had her chin and her bosoms and her bellies all inflated ready for battle. “I don’t give a feck what time it is, your dinner’s ready, and you’re not leaving this room till you’ve eaten it. Sit down at that table. That’s an order.”
“Can’t be done. Sorry again about the hassle. Holly-” Holly was in the doorway, coat dangling half-on one arm, eyes wide. “Schoolbag. Now.”
Ma clouted me in the arm with the fork, hard enough to bruise. “Don’t you dare fecking ignore me! Are you trying to give me a heart attack? Is that what you came back here for, because you wanted to watch your mammy drop dead in front of you?”
Cautiously, one by one, the rest of the gang were appearing in the kitchen doorway behind her to see what was going on. Ashley ducked around Ma and hid in Carmel’s skirt. I said, “It wasn’t top of my agenda, but hey, if that’s how you fancy spending the evening, I can’t stop you. Holly, I said now.”
“Because if that’s the only thing that’ll make you happy, you go on and leave, and I hope you’ll be satisfied when I’m dead. Go on, get out of here. Your poor brother’s after breaking my heart, I’ve nothing left to live for anyway-”
“Josie!” from the bedroom, in a furious roar. “What the bloody hell is going on?” and the inevitable explosion of coughing. We were neck-deep in just about every single reason I had kept Holly away from this shit hole, and we were sinking fast.
“-and here’s me, in spite of everything, killing myself trying to make a lovely Christmas for yous lot, all day and all night at that cooker-”
“Josie! Stop your fucking shouting!”
“Da! We’ve the children here!” from Carmel. She had her hands over Ashley’s ears, and she looked like she wanted to curl up and die.
Ma’s voice was a screech and still rising. I could practically feel her giving me cancer. “-and you, you ungrateful little bastard, you can’t even be bothered sitting your arse down to eat dinner with us-”
“Gee whiz, Ma, it sure is tempting, but I think I’ll pass. Holly, wake up! Schoolbag. Go.” The kid was starting to look shell-shocked. Even at our worst, Olivia and I had always, always managed to keep the bare-knuckle stuff out of her earshot.
“God forgive me, listen to that, just listen to the language out of me, in front of those children-now d’you see what you’re after making me do?”
Another whack with the serving fork. I caught Carmel’s eye over Ma’s head, tapped my watch and said, “Custody agreement,” in an urgent undertone-I was pretty sure Carmel had watched a lot of movies in which callous ex-husbands tortured brave divorcées by playing fast and loose with custody agreements. Her eyes widened. I left her to explain the concept to Ma, grabbed Holly’s arm and her bag and steered her out of there, fast. As we hurried down the stairs (“Out, get out, if you hadn’t come back here upsetting everyone we’d still have your brother alive…”) I caught the even rhythm of Stephen’s voice above us, calm and steady, having a nice civilized chat with Shay.
Then we were out of Number 8, in nighttime and lamplight and silence. The hall door slammed behind us.
I got a huge lungful of cool damp evening air and said, “Sweet Jesus.” I would happily have killed someone for a cigarette.
Holly twitched her shoulder away from me and whipped her schoolbag out of my other hand.
“I’m sorry about all that back there. I really am. You shouldn’t have had to be there for that.”
Holly didn’t deign to answer, or even to look at me. She marched up the Place with her lips pressed shut and her chin at a mutinous angle that told me I was in big trouble as soon as we got ourselves some privacy. On Smith’s Road, three cars down from mine, I spotted Stephen’s, a pimped-out Toyota that he had clearly picked from the detective pool to harmonize with the environment. He had a good eye; I only caught it because of the elaborately casual guy slumped in the passenger seat, refusing to look my way. Stephen, like a good little Boy Scout, had come prepared for anything.
Holly flung herself into her booster seat and slammed the car door hard enough that it nearly came off the hinges. “Why do we have to go?”
She genuinely had no idea. She had left the Shay situation in Daddy’s capable hands; as far as she was concerned, that meant it was sorted, over and done with. One of my main ambitions had been for her to go through life, or at least a few more years of it, without discovering it didn’t work that way.
