Downstairs Julie screamed, “Put me down!” not like she meant it. I said, “Only these days he’s after more than biscuits.”
Rosie raised her bottle. “And fair play to him.”
I asked, “Why would he not be trying to impress you, as well as the others?”
Rosie shrugged. The faintest pink flush had seeped onto her cheeks. “Maybe ’cause he knows I wouldn’t care if he did.”
“No? I thought all the girls fancied Ger.”
Another shrug. “Not my type. I’m not into the big blondie fellas.”
My heart rate went up another notch. I tried to send urgent brainwaves to Ger, who in fairness owed me one, not to put Julie down and let people head back upstairs; not for another hour or two, maybe not ever. After a moment I said, “That necklace’s lovely on you.”
Rosie said, “I’m only after getting it. It’s a bird; lookit.”
She put down the bottle, tucked her feet underneath her and got up on her knees, holding out the pendant towards me. I moved across the sun-striped floorboards and knelt facing her, closer than we had been in years.
The pendant was a silver bird, wings spread wide, tiny feathers made of iridescent abalone shell. When I bent my head over it I was shaking. I had chatted up girls before, all smart-mouthed and cocky, not a bother on me; in that second, I would have sold my soul for one clever line. Instead I said, like an idiot, “It’s pretty.” I reached out towards the pendant, and my finger touched Rosie’s.
Both of us froze. I was so close I could see that soft white skin at the base of her throat lifting with each quick heartbeat and I wanted to bury my face in it, bite it, I had no clue what I wanted to do but I knew every blood vessel in my body would explode if I didn’t do it. I could smell her hair, airy and lemony, dizzying.
It was the speed of that heartbeat that gave me the guts to look up and meet Rosie’s eyes. They were enormous, just a rim of green around black, and her lips were parted like I had startled her. She let the pendant drop. Neither one of us could move and neither one of us was breathing.
Somewhere bike bells were ringing and girls were laughing and Mad Johnny was still singing: “I love you well today, and I’ll love you more tomorrow…” All the sounds dissolved and blurred into that yellow summer air like one long sweet peal of bells. “Rosie,” I said. “Rosie.” I held out my hands to her and she matched her warm palms against mine, and when our fingers folded together and I pulled her towards me I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe my luck.
All that night, after I shut the door and left Number 16 empty, I went looking for the parts of my city that have lasted. I walked down streets that got their names in the Middle Ages: Copper Alley, Fishamble Street, Blackpitts where the plague dead were buried. I looked for cobblestones worn smooth and iron railings gone thin with rust. I ran my hand over the cool stone of Trinity’s walls and I crossed the spot where nine hundred years ago the town got its water from Patrick’s Well; the street sign still tells you so, hidden in the Irish that no one ever reads. I paid no attention to the shoddy new apartment blocks and the neon signs, the sick illusions ready to fall into brown mush like rotten fruit. They’re nothing; they’re not real. In a hundred years they’ll be gone, replaced and forgotten. This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it’s the old stuff, the stuff that’s endured, that might just keep enduring. I tilted my head up to see the delicate, ornate columns and balustrades above Grafton Street’s chain stores and fast-food joints. I leaned my arms on the Ha’penny Bridge where people used to pay half a penny to cross the Liffey, I looked out at the Custom House and the shifting streams of lights and the steady dark roll of the river under the falling snow, and I hoped to God that somehow or other, before it was too late, we would all find our way back home.
Faithful Place did exist once, but it was on the other side of the River Liffey-northside, in the warren of streets that made up the red-light district of Monto, rather than southside in the Liberties-and it was gone long before the events of this book. Every corner of the Liberties is layered with centuries of its own history, and I didn’t want to belittle any of that by pushing an actual street’s stories and inhabitants aside to make way for my fictional story and characters. So, instead, I’ve played fast and loose with Dublin geography: resurrected Faithful Place, moved it across the river, and added this book into the decades when the street doesn’t have a history of its own to be pushed aside.
As always, any inaccuracies, deliberate or otherwise, are mine.
