Someone had thrown my da a nixer of his own that week: four days’ plastering work, no need to tell the dole. He had taken the extra to the pub and treated himself to all the gin he could hold. Gin makes my da sorry for himself; feeling sorry for himself makes my da mean. He had staggered back to the Place and done his little number in front of the Dalys’ house, roaring for Matt Daly to come out and fight, only this time he had taken it that step further. He had started hurling himself against the door; when that got him nowhere except into a heap on the steps, he had pulled off a shoe and started throwing it at the Dalys’ window. This was where Ma and Shay had got there and started trying to drag him inside.
Usually Da coped relatively well with the news that his evening was over, but that night he had plenty of fuel left in the tank. The rest of the road, including Kevin and Jackie, had watched from their windows while he called Ma a dried-up old cunt and Shay a worthless little faggot and Carmel, when she went out to help, a dirty whore. Ma had called him a waster and an animal and prayed he would die roaring and rot in hell. Da had told all three of them to get their hands off him or when they went to sleep that night he would slit their throats. In the meantime, he had done his level best to beat seven shades of shite out of them.
None of this was new. The difference was that, before, he had always kept it indoors. Losing that boundary felt like losing your brakes doing eighty. Carmel said, in a small flat final voice, “He’s getting worse.” No one looked at her.
Kevin and Jackie had screamed out of the window for Da to stop, Shay had screamed at them to get back inside, Ma had screamed at them that this was all their fault for driving their da to drink, Da had screamed at them to just wait till he got up there. Finally, someone-and the Harrison sisters were the only ones on the road who had a phone-had called the Guards. That was a no-no right up there with giving heroin to small children or swearing in front of the priest. My family had managed to push the Harrison sisters all the way out to the other side of that taboo.
Ma and Carmel had begged the uniforms not to take Da-the disgrace of it-and they had been sweet enough to oblige. For plenty of cops, back then, domestic violence was like vandalizing your own property: a dumb idea, but probably not a crime. They had dragged Da up the stairs, dumped him on the kitchen floor and left.
Jackie said, “It was a bad one, all right.”
I said, “I figured that was what did it for Rosie. All her life, her da’s been warning her about what a shower of filthy savages the Mackeys are. She’s ignored him, she’s fallen in love with me, she’s told herself I’m different. And then, right when she’s a few hours away from putting her whole life into my hands, right when every minuscule doubt in her mind has to be a thousand times its normal size, here come the Mackeys to demonstrate Daddy’s point in living color: putting on a holy show for the entire neighborhood, howling and brawling and biting and throwing shite like a troop of baboons on PCP. She had to wonder what I was like behind closed doors. She had to wonder if, deep down, I was one of them. She had to wonder just how long that would take to surface.”
“So you left. Even without her.”
I said, “I figured I’d paid my way out.”
“I wondered about that. Why you didn’t just come home.”
“If I’d had the money, I’d have hopped straight on a plane to Australia. The farther the better.”
Jackie asked, “Do you still blame them? Or was that just the drink talking, last night?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do. The whole lot of them. That’s probably unfair, but sometimes life can just be a big old bitch.”
My phone beeped: text message. Hi frank, kev here, not meanin 2 hassle u cos i no u r a busy man but when u get a chance give us a bell ok? Could do w a chat. Thx. I deleted it.
Jackie said, “But what if she wasn’t walking out on you after all? If that never happened?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one-a big part of my head didn’t even understand the question-and it felt decades too late to go looking for one. I ignored Jackie till she shrugged and started refurbishing her lipstick. I watched Holly spin in great crazy circles as the swing chains untwisted, and I very carefully thought about exactly nothing except whether she needed to put on her scarf, how long it would be before she simmered down enough to be hungry, and what I wanted on my pizza.
