The stairs creaked and flexed ominously under our weight, but they held. I started with the top front room, where I had found Rosie’s note and where, according to Ma and Da, the Polish boys had found her suitcase. There was a great jagged hole where they had ripped out the fireplace; the wall around it was crowded with faded graffiti explaining who loved who, who was gay and who should fuck off. Somewhere on that fireplace, on their way to someone’s Ballsbridge mansion, were my initials and Rosie’s.
The floor was littered with the same old predictable stuff, cans and butts and wrappers, but most of it was thick with dust-kids had better places to hang out, these days, and enough money to get into them-and, attractively, used condoms had been added to the mix. In my day those were illegal; if you were lucky enough to get into a situation that called for one, you took your chances and spent the next few weeks shitting bricks. All the high corners were clotted with cobwebs, and there was a thin cold wind whistling through the gaps around the sash windows. Any day now those windows would be gone, sold to some merchant wanker whose wife wanted an adorable little touch of authenticity. I said-the place made me talk softly-“I lost my virginity in this room.”
I felt Kevin glance at me, wanting to ask, but he held back. He said, “I can think of a lot more comfortable places for a ride.”
“We had a blanket. And comfort isn’t everything. I wouldn’t have swapped this dive for the penthouse of the Shelburne.”
After a moment Kevin shivered. “God, this place is depressing.”
“Think of it as atmosphere. A trip down Memory Lane.”
“Fuck that. I stay as far from Memory Lane as I can. Did you hear the Dalys? How bloody miserable were Sundays in the eighties? Mass, and then the shite Sunday dinner-how much do you want to bet it was boiled bacon, roast potatoes and cabbage?”
“Don’t forget the pudding.” I ran the torch beam along the floorboards: a few minor holes, a few splintered ends, no mended patches-and in here anything mended would have stuck out like a sore thumb. “Angel Delight, every time. Tasted like strawberry-flavored chalk, but if you didn’t eat it, you were making the black babies starve.”
“God, yeah. And then nothing to do all day long except hang out on the corner in the cold, unless you could bunk into the cinema or unless you wanted to put up with Ma and Da. Nothing on the telly except Father Whoever’s sermon about contraception making you go blind, and even for that you had to spend hours messing around with those bloody rabbit ears trying to get the reception… By the end of some Sundays, I swear I was so bored I was looking forward to school.”
Nothing where the fireplace had been, or up the chimney; just a bird’s nest at the top, and years’ worth of white droppings streaked down the sides. The chimney was barely wide enough to fit the suitcase. There was no way anyone could have got a grown woman’s body up there, even temporarily. I said, “I’m telling you, mate, you should’ve come in here. This was where all the action was. Sex, drugs and rock and roll.”
“By the time I was old enough for the good action, nobody came in here any more. There were rats.”
“There always were. They added atmosphere. Come on.” I headed into the next room.
Kevin trailed after me. “They added germs. You weren’t here for it, but someone put down poison or something-I think it was Mad Johnny, you know how he had a total thing about rats, because of being in the trenches or whatever? Anyway, a bunch of the rats crawled into the walls and died, and Jesus, I’m not kidding, the smell of them. Worse than the piggeries. We’d have died of typhoid.”
“Smells fine to me.” I did the routine with the torch again. I was starting to wonder if I was on the world’s stupidest wild-goose chase. One night of my family, and the loony was already rubbing off all over me.
“Well, yeah, obviously it went away after a while. But by that time we’d all switched to hanging around in that empty lot up at the corner of Copper Lane, you know the one? It was shite too-in winter you froze your balls off, and there were nettles and barbed wire all over the place-but all the kids from Copper Lane and Smith’s Road hung out there too, so you had a better chance of getting a drink or a snog or whatever you were after. So we never really came back here.”
“You missed out.”
“Yeah.” Kevin glanced around dubiously. He had his hands in his pockets, keeping his jacket wrapped tightly around himself so it wouldn’t touch anything. “I’ll live. This kind of stuff is why I can’t stand it when people get nostalgic about the eighties. Kids bored to death, or playing with barbed wire, or shagging in bloody rat holes… What’s to miss?”
