“Jenny and me. Pat and his brother Ian. Shona Williams. Conor Brennan. Ross McKenna—Mac. There were a couple of others who hung out with us sometimes, but that was the real gang.”
I rummaged in my cardboard box, found a photo album—pink cover, flowers made of sequins—and flipped it open at a Post-it. Seven teenagers perched on a wall, squashed together to fit in the shot, laughter and brandished ice cream cones and bright T-shirts. Fiona had braces, Jenny’s hair was a shade darker; Pat had his arms wrapped around her—his shoulders were already as broad as a man’s, but his face was a boy’s, open and ruddy—and she was taking a huge mock-bite out of his ice cream. Conor was all gangly legs and arms, doing a goofy chimpanzee impression, falling off the wall. I said, “Is this the gang?”
Fiona put her tea down on the table—too quickly; a few drops slopped out—and reached out a hand to the album. She said, “That’s Jenny’s.”
“I know,” I said gently. “We needed to borrow it, just for a while.”
It made her shoulders jump, the sudden feel of our fingers probing deep into their lives. “God,” she said, involuntarily.
“We’ll have it back to Jenny as soon as possible.”
“Can you… If you get done with it in time, maybe could you just not tell her you had it? She doesn’t need anything else to deal with. This…” Fiona spread her hand across the photo. She said, so quietly I barely heard her, “We were really happy.”
I said, “We’ll do our best. You can help there, too. If you can give us all the info we need, then we can avoid asking Jenny these questions.”
She nodded, without looking up. “Well done,” I said. “Now, this has to be Ian. Am I right?” Ian was a couple of years younger than Pat, skinnier and brown-haired, but the resemblance was obvious.
“Yeah, that’s Ian. God, he looks so young there… He was really shy, back then.”
I tapped Conor’s chest. “And who’s this?”
“That’s Conor.”
It came out promptly and easily, no tension around it. I said, “He’s the guy holding Emma in her christening photo, the one in her room. He’s her godfather?”
“Yeah.” The mention of Emma made Fiona’s face tighten up. She pressed her fingertips on the photo like she was trying to push herself into it.
I said easily, moving on to the next face, “Which makes this guy Mac, right?” Chubby and bristle-haired, outflung arms and pristine white Nikes. You could have told what generation these kids were just from their clothes: no hand-me-downs, nothing mended, everything was brand-new and brand name.
“Yeah. And that’s Shona.” Red hair, the kind that would have been frizzy if she hadn’t spent a lot of time with the straighteners, and skin that I would have bet was freckled under the fake tan and careful makeup. For a strange second I almost felt sorry for these kids. When I was that age, my friends and I were all poor together; it had very little to recommend it, but at least it had involved less effort. “Her and Mac, they were the ones who could always make us laugh. I’d forgotten her looking like that. She’s blond now.”
I asked, “So you all stay in touch?” I caught myself hoping the answer was yes—not for investigative reasons, but for Pat and Jenny, stranded on their cold deserted island, sea winds blowing. It would have been good to know that some roots had held strong for them.
“Not really. I have the others’ phone numbers, but it’s been ages. I should ring them, tell them, but I just… I can’t.”
She brought her mug to her mouth to hide her face. “Leave the numbers with us,” Richie said helpfully. “We’ll do it. No reason you should have to break the news.”
Fiona nodded, without looking at him, and fumbled in her pockets for her phone. Richie ripped a page out of his notebook and passed it to her. As she wrote I asked, moving her back towards safer ground, “It sounds like you were a pretty close-knit bunch. How did you get out of touch?”
“Just life, mostly. Once Pat and Jenny and Conor went to college… Shona and Mac are a year younger than them, and me and Ian are another year, so we weren’t on the same buzz any more. They could go to pubs, and proper clubs, and they were meeting new people at college—and without the three of them, the rest of us just didn’t… It wasn’t the same.” She handed the paper and pen back to Richie. “We all tried—at first we all still saw each other all the time. It was weird because suddenly we had to schedule stuff days in advance and someone was always pulling out at the last minute, but we did hang out. Gradually, though, it just got to be less and less. Even up until a couple of years ago, we still met up for a pint every few weeks, but it just… it stopped working.”
She had her hands wrapped around the mug again, tilting it in circles and watching the tea swirl. The smell of it was doing its job, making this alien place feel homey and safe. “Actually, it probably stopped working a long time before that. You can see it in the photos: we stop being jigsawed together like in that one there, instead we’re just these elbows and knees stuck out at each other, all awkward… We just didn’t want to see it. Pat, especially. The less it worked, the harder he tried. We’d be sitting on the pier or somewhere, and Pat’d be spread out till he was practically stretching, trying to keep close to all of us, make it feel like one big gang again. I think he was proud of it, that he still hung out with the same friends he’d had since he was a kid. That meant something to him. He didn’t want to let it go.”
She was unusual, Fiona: perceptive, acute, sensitive; the kind of girl who would spend a long time alone thinking about something she didn’t understand, picking away at it until the knot unraveled. It made her a useful witness, but I don’t like dealing with unusual people. “Four guys, three girls,” I said. “Three couples and an odd man out? Or just a gang of mates?”
Fiona almost smiled, down at the photo. “A gang of mates, basically. Even when Jenny and Pat started going out, it didn’t change things as much as you’d think. Everyone had seen it coming for ages, anyway.”
I said, “I remember you saying you dreamed about someone loving you the way Pat loved Jenny. The other lads were no prizes, no? You didn’t bother giving it a go with any of them?”
She blushed. The rosiness drove the gray out of her face, turned her young and vivid. For a moment I thought it was for Pat, that he had been filling up the place other boys could have had, but she said, “I actually did. Conor… we went out, just for a while. Four months, the summer I was sixteen.”
Which was practically marriage, at that age. I caught the tiny shift of Richie’s feet. I said, “But he treated you badly.”
The blush brightened. “No. Not badly. I mean, he was never mean to me, nothing like that.”
“Really? Most kids that age, they can be pretty cruel.”
“Conor never was. He was… he’s a sweet guy. Kind.”
I said, “But… ?”
“But…” Fiona rubbed at her cheeks, like she was trying to wipe the flush away. “I mean, I was kind of startled when he even asked me out—I always wondered if maybe he was into Jenny. Nothing he said, just… you know how you get a vibe? And then, once we were going out, he… it felt like… I mean, we had a great time, we had a laugh, but he always wanted to do stuff together with Pat and Jenny. Like go to the cinema with them, or go hang out on the beach with them, or whatever. All his body, all the angles of him always pointed Jenny’s way. And when he looked at her… he lit up. He’d tell some joke, and on the punch line he’d look at her, not at me…”
And there was our motive, the oldest one in the world. In a strange way, it was comforting, knowing that I had been right, way back at the beginning: this hadn’t blown in off the wide sea like some killer gale and crashed into the Spains at random. It had grown out of their own lives.
I could feel Richie practically thrumming, beside me, with how badly he wanted to move. I didn’t look at him. I said, “You thought it was Jenny he wanted. He was going out with you to get closer to her.”
I tried to soften it, b
ut it came out brutal all the same. She flinched. “I guess. Sort of. I think maybe partly that, and partly he was hoping, if we were together, we’d be like them; like Jenny and Pat. They were…”
On the page facing the group shot was a photo of Pat and Jenny—taken the same day, going by the clothes. They were side by side on the wall, leaning into each other, faces turned together, close enough that their noses brushed. Jenny was smiling up at Pat; his face looking down at her was absorbed, intent, happy. The air around them was a hot, sweet summer-white. Far behind their shoulders, a slip of sea was blue as flowers.
Fiona’s hand hovered over the photo, like she wanted to touch but couldn’t do it. She said, “I took that.”
“It’s very good.”
“They were easy to shoot. Most of the time, when you’re taking a shot of two people, you have to be careful with the space in between them, how it breaks up the light. With Pat and Jenny, it was like the light didn’t break, just kept going straight across the gap… They were something special. They both had a load going for them anyway—they were both really popular at school, Pat was great at rugby, Jenny always had a load of guys after her—but together… They were golden. I could’ve watched them all day. You looked at them and you thought, That. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
Her fingertip brushed their clasped hands, skated away. “Conor… his parents were separated, his dad was over in England or somewhere—I’m not positive, Conor never talked about him. Pat and Jenny were the happiest couple he’d ever known. It was like he wanted to be them, and he thought if we went out together, we might… I didn’t put all this stuff into words at the time, or anything, but afterwards, I thought maybe…”
I asked, “Did you talk to him about it?”
“No. I was too embarrassed. I mean, my sister . . .” Fiona ran her hands through her hair, pulling it forward to hide her cheeks. “I just broke it off. It wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t like I was in love with him. We were just kids.”
But it must have been a big deal, all the same. My sister… Richie shoved back his chair and headed across to switch on the electric kettle again. He said easily, over his shoulder, “I remember you told us Pat got jealous of other guys fancying Jenny, back when you were teenagers. Was that Conor, yeah?”
That brought Fiona’s head up, but he was shaking a coffee sachet and looking at her with simple interest. She said, “He wasn’t jealous like you mean. He just… he’d noticed it, too. So when I broke up with Conor, Pat got me on my own a couple of days later and asked me was that why. I didn’t want to tell him, but Pat… he’s really easy to talk to. I always told him stuff. He was like my big brother. So we ended up talking about it.”
Richie whistled. “When I was a young fella,” he said, “I would’ve been raging if my mate was after my girlfriend. I’m not the violent type, but he’d’ve got a smack in the puss.”
“I think Pat thought about it. I mean”—a sudden flash of alarm—“he wasn’t the violent type either, not ever, but like you said… He was pretty angry. He’d called round to our house to see me—Jenny was out shopping—and when I told him he just walked out. He was white; his face looked like it was made out of something solid. I was actually scared—not that I thought he’d do anything to Conor, I knew he wouldn’t, but I just… I thought what if everyone found out, it’d smash the gang to pieces, everything would be horrible. I wished…” She ducked her head. More quietly, down to her mug: “I wished I’d kept my stupid mouth shut. Or just never gone near Conor to begin with.”
I said, “It was hardly your fault. You couldn’t have known. Or could you?”
Fiona shrugged. “Probably not. I felt like I could’ve, though. Like, why would he be into me when Jenny was around?” Her head was tucked down lower.
There it was again, that glimpse of something deep and tangled, stretched between her and Jenny. I said, “That must have been pretty humiliating.”
“I survived. I mean, I was sixteen; everything was humiliating.”
She was trying to turn it into a joke, but it fell flat. Richie gave her a grin, as he leaned over her shoulder to take her mug, but she passed it to him without catching his eye. I said, “Pat wasn’t the only one who had a right to be pissed off. Weren’t you angry, too? With Jenny, or Conor, or both?”
“I wasn’t that kind of kid. I just felt like it was my own fault. For being such an idiot.”
I asked, “And Pat didn’t get physical with Conor after all?”
“I don’t think so. Neither of them had bruises or anything, not that I saw. I don’t know exactly what happened. Pat phoned me the next day and said not to worry about it, forget we ever had the conversation. I asked him what happened, but all he’d say was that it wasn’t going to be a problem any more.”
In other words, Pat had kept control, dealt neatly with a nasty situation and kept the drama to a minimum. Conor, meanwhile, had been smacked down good and hard by Pat, humiliated even more excruciatingly than Fiona, and left in no doubt that he didn’t have a chance in hell with Jenny. This time I did look at Richie. He was messing with tea bags.
I asked, “And was it a problem after that?”
“No. Never. None of us ever said anything about it. Conor was extra nice to me for a while, like maybe he was trying to make up for things going wrong—except he always was nice to me anyway, so… And I got the feeling he was keeping his distance from Jenny—nothing too obvious, but he made sure it was never just the two of them going anywhere, stuff like that. Basically, though, everything went back to normal.”
Fiona had her head bent, picking bobbles of fluff off the sleeve of her cardigan, and the residue of that blush was still on her cheeks. I asked, “Did Jenny find out?”
“That I’d broken up with Conor? She couldn’t exactly miss it.”
“That he had been interested in her.”
The tinge of red deepened again. “I think she did, actually. I mean, I actually think she might have known all along. I never told her, and no way would Conor have, or Pat—he’s really protective, he wouldn’t have wanted to worry her. But one night, a couple of weeks after that stuff with Pat happened, Jenny came into my room—we were getting ready for bed, she was already in her pajamas. She was just standing there, messing with my hair clips, sticking them on the ends of her fingers and stuff. In the end I was like, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘I’m really sorry about you and Conor.’ I said something like, ‘I’m fine, I don’t care’—I mean, it had been weeks, she’d already said it a load of times, I didn’t know what she was getting at—but she went, ‘No, seriously. If it was my fault—if I could’ve done anything differently… I mean, I’m so, so sorry, that’s all.’”
Fiona laughed, a small wry breath. “God, we were both dying of embarrassment. I was like, ‘No, it wasn’t your fault, why would it be your fault, I’m fine, good night…’ I just wanted her to leave. Jenny—for a second I thought she was going to say something else, so I stuck my head in the wardrobe and started throwing clothes around, like I was getting out stuff for the next day. When I looked around, she’d gone. We never talked about it again, but that’s why I figured she knew. About Conor.”
“And she was worried that you felt she’d been leading him on,” I said. “Did you?”
“I never even thought about it.” Fiona caught my questioning eyebrow, and her eyes skipped away. “Well. I mean, I thought about it, but I never blamed her for… Jenny liked flirting. She liked getting attention from guys—she was eighteen, of course she did. I don’t think she encouraged Conor, exactly, but I think she knew he was into her, and I think she enjoyed it. That’s all.”
I asked, “Do you think she did anything about it?”
Fiona’s head snapped up and she stared at me. “Like what? Like telling him to back off? Or like getting together with him?”
I said blandly, “Either one.”
“She was going out with Pat! Like seriously going out, not just kid stuff. They were in love. And
Jenny’s not some kind of two-timing— That’s my sister you’re talking about.”
I raised my hands. “I’m not doubting for a second that they were in love. But a teenage girl, just starting to realize that she’s going to spend the rest of her life with the same man: she could panic, feel like she needed one little moment with another guy before she settled down. That wouldn’t make her a slut.”
Fiona was shaking her head, hair flying. “You don’t get it. Jenny— When she does something, she does it properly. Even if she hadn’t been crazy about Pat—and she was—she’d never cheat on anyone. Not even a kiss.”
She was telling the truth, but that didn’t mean she was right. Once Conor’s mind started breaking loose from its moorings, one old kiss could have grown into a million sweet possibilities, swaying just out of reach. “Fair enough,” I said. “What about confronting Conor? Would she have done that?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, what for? What good would it have done? It would’ve just embarrassed everyone, and maybe messed up Pat and Conor. Jenny wouldn’t have wanted that. She’s not some drama queen.”
Richie poured boiling water. “I’d have said Pat and Conor were already well messed up, no? I mean, even if Pat didn’t give Conor a few slaps that day, he wasn’t a holy martyr. He couldn’t exactly keep on being mates like nothing had happened.”
“Why not? It’s not like Conor had done anything. They were best friends; they weren’t going to let something like that wreck everything. Is any of this… ? Why… ? I mean, it was like eleven years ago.”
Fiona was starting to look wary. Richie shrugged, dumping a tea bag in the bin. “I’m only saying: they must’ve been pretty close, if they got past something like that. I’ve had good mates in my time, but I’ve got to say, any of that carry-on and they’d’ve been on their bikes.”
“They were. Close. We all were, but Pat and Conor, they were different. I think…” Richie handed her a fresh mug of tea; she swirled the spoon in it absently. She was concentrating, feeling for the words. “I always thought it was because of their dads. Conor’s dad, like I told you, he wasn’t around, and Pat’s dad died when he was like eight… That makes a difference. To guys, especially. There’s something about guys who had to be the man of the family when they were just kids. Guys who had to be too responsible, too early. It shows.”