The girls were laughing too hard to keep clapping. They were collapsed together in the corner, heads on each other’s shoulders, holding their stomachs. Imelda was wiping away tears. “You sexy beast, you-”
“Ah, God, I think I’m after rupturing myself-” from Rosie.
“That’s not pecs!” Mandy gasped. “That’s a pair of diddies!”
“They’re grand,” Ger said, injured, dropping the pose and inspecting his chest. “They’re not diddies. Here, lads, are they diddies?”
“They’re gorgeous,” I told him. “Bring them here to me and I’ll measure them for a lovely new bra.”
“Fuck off, you.”
“If I had those I’d never leave the house again.”
“Fuck off and die. What’s wrong with them?”
“Are they meant to be all squishy?” Julie wanted to know.
“Give us that back,” Ger demanded, waving a hand at Mandy for his T-shirt. “If yous don’t appreciate these, I’m putting them away again.”
Mandy dangled the T-shirt from one finger and looked at him under her lashes. “Might hang on to it for a souvenir.”
“Janey Mac, the smell off that,” Imelda said, batting it away from her face. “Mind yourself: I’d say you could get pregnant just touching that yoke.”
Mandy shrieked and threw the T-shirt at Julie, who caught it and shrieked louder. Ger made a grab for it, but Julie ducked under his arm and jumped up: “’Melda, catch!” Imelda caught the shirt one-handed on her way up, twisted away from Zippy when he got an arm around her and was out the door in a flash of long legs and long hair, waving his shirt behind her like a banner. Ger went thumping after her and Des held out a hand to pull me up on his way past, but Rosie was leaning back against the wall and laughing, and I wasn’t moving until she did. Julie was tugging down her pencil skirt on her way out, Mandy threw Rosie a wicked look over her shoulder and called, “Hang on, yous, wait for me!” and then all of a sudden the room was quiet and it was just me and Rosie, smiling a little at each other across the spilled bonbons and the near-empty cider bottles and the curls of leftover smoke.
My heart was going like I had been running. I couldn’t remember the last time we had been alone together. I said-I had some confused idea about showing her I wasn’t planning a lunge-“Will we go after them?”
Rosie said, “I’m grand here. Unless you want to…?”
“Ah, no; no. I can live without getting my hands on Ger Brophy’s shirt.”
“He’ll be lucky to get it back. In one bit, anyway.”
“He’ll survive. He can show off his pecs on the walk home.” I tipped one of the cider bottles; there were still a few swigs left. “D’you want more?”
She held out a hand. I put one of the bottles into it-our fingers almost touched-and picked up the other. “Cheers.”
“Sláinte.”
The summer stretch had come into the evenings: it was gone seven, but the sky was a soft clear blue and the light flooding through the open windows was pale gold. All around us the Place was humming like a beehive, shimmering with a hundred different stories unfurling. Next door Mad Johnny Malone was singing to himself, in a cheerful cracked baritone: “Where the Strawberry Beds sweep down to the Liffey, you’ll kiss away the worries from my brow…” Downstairs Mandy shrieked delightedly, there was a tumble of thumping noises and then an explosion of laughter; farther down, in the basement, someone yelled in pain and Shay and his mates sent up a savage cheer. In the street, two of Sallie Hearne’s young fellas were teaching themselves to ride a robbed bike and giving each other hassle-“No, you golf ball, you’ve to go fast or you’ll fall off, who cares if you hit things?”-and someone was whistling on his way home from work, putting in all the fancy, happy little trills. The smell of fish and chips came in at the windows, along with smart-arse comments from a blackbird on a rooftop and the voices of women swapping the day’s gossip while they brought in their washing from the back gardens. I knew every voice and every door-slam; I even knew the determined rhythm of Mary Halley scrubbing her front steps. If I had listened hard I could have picked out every single person woven into that summer-evening air, and told you every story.
Rosie said, “So tell us: what really happened with Ger and the girder?”
I laughed. “I’m saying nothing.”
“Wasn’t me he was trying to impress, anyway; it was Julie and Mandy. And I won’t blow his cover.”
“Swear?”
She grinned and crossed her heart with one finger, on the soft white skin just where her shirt opened. “Swear.”
“He did catch a girder that was falling. And if he hadn’t it would’ve hit Paddy Fearon, and Paddy wouldn’t’ve walked out of there tonight.”
“But…?”
“But it was sliding off a stack down in the yard, and Ger caught it just before it fell on Paddy’s toe.”
Rosie burst out laughing. “The chancer. That’s typical, d’you know that? Back when we were little young ones, like eight or nine, Ger had the lot of us convinced that he had diabetes, and if we didn’t give him the biscuits out of our school lunches, he’d die. Hasn’t changed a bit, has he?”
