My phone rang again: Kevin. I said, “For fuck’s sake,” more viciously than I meant to. Giving him the number had made sense at the time, but give my family an inch and they’ll move into your house and start redecorating. I couldn’t even turn the thing off, not with people out there who could need me anytime. “If bloody Kev is always this bad at taking hints, no wonder he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
Jackie gave my arm a soothing pat. “Don’t mind him. You just let it ring there. I’ll ask him tonight was it anything important.”
“No, thanks.”
“I’d say he just wants to know when can yous meet up again.”
“I don’t know how to get this through to you, Jackie: I do not give a tinker’s damn what Kevin wants. Although if it turns out you’re right and he wants to know when we’ll meet up, you can tell him this from me, with love and kisses: never. OK?”
“Ah, Francis, stop. You know you don’t mean that.”
“I do. Believe me, Jackie, I do.”
“He’s your brother.”
“And as far as I can tell, he’s a very nice guy who I’m sure is loved by all his wide circle of friends and acquaintances. But I’m not one of them. My only connection to Kevin was an accident of nature that tossed us into the same house for a few years. Now that we don’t live there any more, he’s nothing to do with me, any more than that guy on the bench over there. The same goes for Carmel, the same goes for Shay, and the same very definitely goes for Ma and Da. We don’t know each other, we have exactly fuck-all in common, and I can’t see any reason on God’s green earth why we would want to meet for tea and cookies.”
Jackie said, “Cop on to yourself, would you ever. You know well it’s not that simple.”
The phone rang again. “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
She poked at leftover leaves with a toe and waited for the phone to shriek itself into silence. Then she said, “Yesterday you said you blamed us for Rosie walking out on you.”
I took a long breath and lightened my voice. “I’m hardly going to blame you, chicken. You were barely out of diapers.”
“Is that why you don’t mind seeing me?”
I said, “I didn’t think you’d even remember that night.”
“I asked Carmel about it yesterday, after… I remember bits, only. All the times get mixed up together, you know yourself.”
I said, “Not that time. That one’s clear as crystal.”
It was coming up to three in the morning by the time my mate Wiggy finished moonlighting at the nightclub and showed up at the car park to give me my few bob and take over the rest of his shift. I walked home through the last raucous, staggering dregs of Saturday night, whistling softly to myself and dreaming about tomorrow and pitying every man who wasn’t me. When I turned the corner into Faithful Place, I was walking on air.
I knew straightaway, in my armpits, that something had happened. Half the windows on the street, including ours, were blazing with light. If you stood still at the top of the road and listened you could hear the voices buzzing away behind them, wound tight and giddy with excitement.
The door of our flat was scored with brand-new dents and scuff marks. In the front room there was a kitchen chair upside down against the wall, legs splayed and splintered. Carmel was on her knees on the floor, wearing her coat over a faded flowery nightie, sweeping up broken china with a dustpan and brush; her hands were shaking so hard that she kept dropping bits. Ma was planted in one corner of the sofa, breathing in heaves and dabbing at a split lip with a wet facecloth; Jackie was curled up in the other, with her thumb in her mouth and her blankie wrapped around her. Kevin was in the armchair, biting his nails and staring at nothing. Shay was leaning against the wall, shifting from foot to foot, with his hands dug deep into his pockets; his eyes had wild white rings around them, like a cornered animal’s, and his nostrils flared when he breathed. He was getting a beauty of a black eye. From the kitchen I could hear the sound of my da getting sick, in great rasping shouts, into the sink.
I said, “What happened?”
They all jumped a mile. Five pairs of eyes turned towards me, enormous and unblinking, with no expression at all. Carmel had been crying.
Shay said, “You’ve got great timing.” Nobody else said a word. After a while I took the dustpan and brush out of Carmel’s hands, guided her gently onto the sofa between Ma and Jackie, and started sweeping up. A long time after that, the noises from the kitchen changed to snores. Shay went in, quietly, and came out with the sharp knives. None of us went to bed that night.
