I see Jackie every few weeks and she keeps me up to speed, depending on your definition of the term. She feels I need to know every detail of everyone’s life, while I feel I need to know if someone dies, so it took us a while to find that happy medium. When I walked back into Faithful Place, I knew that Carmel had four kids and an arse like the 77A bus, Shay was living upstairs from our parents and working in the same bike shop he left school for, Kevin was selling flat-screen TVs and had a new girlfriend every month, Da had done something unclear to his back, and Ma was still Ma. Jackie, to round out the picture, is a hairdresser and lives with this guy Gavin who she says she might marry someday. If she had been following orders, which I doubted, the others knew sweet fuck-all about me.
The hall door was unlocked, so was the flat door. No one leaves doors open in Dublin any more. Jackie, tactfully, had arranged things so I could make my entrance my own way. There were voices coming from the front room; short sentences, long pauses.
“Howyis,” I said, in the doorway.
A ripple of cups going down, heads turning. My ma’s snappy black eyes and five bright-blue pairs exactly like mine, all staring at me.
“Hide the heroin,” Shay said. He was leaning against the window with his hands in his pockets; he’d watched me coming down the road. “It’s the pigs.”
The landlord had finally put in a carpet, a flowery green and pink thing. The room still smelled of toast, damp and furniture polish, with a faint dirty undercurrent I couldn’t place. There was a tray full of doilies and digestive biscuits on the table. My da and Kevin were in the armchairs; my ma was on the sofa, with Carmel and Jackie on either side, like a war leader showing off two prize prisoners.
My ma is your classic Dublin mammy: five foot nothing of curler-haired, barrel-shaped don’t-mess-with-this, fueled by an endless supply of disapproval. The prodigal son’s welcome went like this:
“Francis,” Ma said. She eased back into the sofa, folded her arms where her waist would have been and eyed me up and down. “Could you not be bothered putting on a decent shirt, even?”
I said, “Howya, Ma.”
“Mammy, not Ma. The state of you. The neighbors’ll think I raised a homeless.”
Somewhere along the way I swapped the army parka for a brown leather jacket, but apart from that I still have much the same fashion sense I left home with. If I’d worn a suit, she would have given me hassle for having notions of myself. With my ma you don’t expect to win. “Jackie sounded like it was urgent,” I said. “Howya, Da.”
Da was looking better than I’d expected. Back in the day, I was the one who took after him-same thick brown hair, same rough-edged features-but the resemblance had faded a lot along the way, which was nice. He was starting to turn into an old fella-white hair, trousers up above his ankles-but he still had enough muscle that you’d think twice before taking him on. He looked stone cold sober, although with him you never could tell till it was too late. “Nice of you to honor us,” he said. His voice was deeper and hoarser; too many Camels. “You’ve still got a neck like a jockey’s bollix.”
“So they keep telling me. Howya, Carmel. Kev. Shay.”
Shay didn’t bother to answer. “Francis,” Kevin said. He was staring at me like I was a ghost. He’d turned into a big guy, fair and solid and good-looking; bigger than me. “Jaysus.”
“Language,” Ma snapped.
“You’re looking very well,” Carmel informed me, predictably. If the Risen Lord appeared to Carmel one morning, she’d tell him he was looking very well. Her arse was in fact pretty high-impact, and she had developed a genteel meet-my-sinuses accent that didn’t surprise me one bit. Things around here were more like they used to be than they ever had been. “Thanks very much,” I said. “So are you.”
“Come here, you,” Jackie said to me. Jackie has complicated peroxide hair and she dresses like something out of a Tom Waits diner; that day she was wearing white pedal pushers and a red polka-dot top with ruffles in bewildering places. “Sit down there and have a cup of tea. I’ll get another cup.” She got up and headed for the kitchen, giving me an encouraging little wink and a pinch on her way.
“I’m grand,” I said, stopping her. The thought of sitting next to Ma made the hair go up on the back of my neck. “Let’s have a look at this famous suitcase.”
“Where’s your rush?” Ma demanded. “Sit down there.”
“Business before pleasure. Where’s the case?”
Shay nodded to the floor at his feet. “All yours,” he said. Jackie sat down again with a thump. I picked my way around the coffee table and the sofa and the chairs, under all those eyes.
