Her lamp went out. The curtain twitched, just a cautious inch. I flicked on my torch, pointed it straight at my face and waved. When she had had time to recognize me, I put a finger to my lips and then beckoned.
After a moment Nora’s lamp went on again. She pulled back a curtain and flapped a hand at me, but it could have meant anything, Go away or Hang on. I beckoned again, more urgently, grinning reassuringly and hoping the torchlight wouldn’t turn it into a Jack Nicholson leer. She pushed at her hair, getting frustrated; then—resourceful, like her sister—she leaned forward on the windowsill, breathed on the pane and wrote with a finger: WAIT. She even did it backwards, fair play to her, to make it easy for me to read. I gave her the thumbs-up, switched off the torch and waited.
Whatever the Dalys’ bedtime routine involved, it was nearly midnight before the back door opened and Nora came half running, half tiptoeing down the garden. She had thrown on a long wool coat over her skirt and jumper and she was breathless, one hand pressed to her chest. “God, that door—I had to haul on it to get it open and then it slammed back on me, sounded like a car crash, did you hear it? I nearly fainted—”
I grinned and moved over on the bench. “Didn’t hear a sound. You’re a born cat burglar. Have a seat.”
She stayed where she was, catching her breath and watching me with quick-moving, wary eyes. “I can only stay a minute. I just came out to see . . . I don’t know. How you’re doing. If you’re all right.”
“I’m better for seeing you. You look like you nearly had a heart attack there, though.”
That got a reluctant little smile. “I nearly did, yeah. I was sure my da’d be down any second . . . I feel like I’m sixteen and climbed down the drainpipe.”
In the dark winter-blue garden, with her face washed clean for the night and her hair tumbling, she looked barely older. I said, “Is that how you spent your wild youth? You little rebel, you.”
“Me? God, no, not a chance; not with my da. I was a good girl. I missed out on all that stuff; I only heard about it from my mates.”
“In that case,” I said, “you’ve got every right to all the catching up you can get. Try this, while you’re at it.” I pulled out my cigarettes, flipped the packet open and offered it to her with a flourish. “Cancer stick?”
Nora gave it a doubtful look. “I don’t smoke.”
“And there’s no reason you should start. Tonight doesn’t count. Tonight you’re sixteen and a bold little rebel. I only wish I’d brought a bottle of cheap cider.”
After a moment I saw the corner of her mouth slowly curve up again. “Why not,” she said, and she dropped down beside me and took a smoke.
“Good woman yourself.” I leaned over and lit it for her, smiling into her eyes. She pulled too hard on it and collapsed into a coughing fit, with me fanning her and both of us stifling giggles and pointing at the house and shushing each other and snickering even harder. “Oh, my Jaysus,” Nora said, wiping her eyes, when she could breathe again. “I’m not cut out for this.”
“Little puffs,” I told her. “And don’t bother inhaling. Remember, you’re a teenager, so this isn’t about the nicotine; this is all about looking cool. Watch the expert.” I slouched down on the bench James Dean style, slid a cigarette into the corner of my lip, lit it and jutted my jaw to blow out smoke in a long stream. “There. See?”
She was giggling again. “You look like a gangster.”
“That’s the idea. If you want to go for the sophisticated starlet look, though, we can do that too. Sit up straight.” She did. “Cross your legs. Now, chin down, look at me sideways, purse up your lips, and . . .” She took a puff, threw in an extravagant wrist flourish and blew smoke at the sky. “Beautiful,” I said. “You are now officially the ice-coolest wild child on the block. Congratulations.”
Nora laughed and did it again. “I am, amn’t I?”
“Yep. Like a duck to water. I always knew there was a bad girl in there.”
After a moment she said, “Did you and Rosie use to meet out here?”
“Nah. I was too scared of your da.”
She nodded, examining the glowing tip of her smoke. “I was thinking about you, this evening.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“Rosie. And Kevin. Is that not why you came here, as well?”
“Yeah,” I said, carefully. “More or less. I figured, if anyone knows what the last few days have been like . . .”
“I miss her, Francis. A lot.”
“I know you do, babe. I know. So do I.”
“I wouldn’t have expected . . . Before, I only missed her once in a blue moon: when I had the baby and she wasn’t there to come see him, or when Ma or Da got on my nerves and I’d have loved to ring Rosie and give out about them. The rest of the time I barely thought about her, not any more. I’d other things to be thinking about. But when we found out she was dead, I couldn’t stop crying.”
“I’m not the crying type,” I said, “but I know what you mean.”
Nora tapped ash, aiming it into the gravel where Daddy might not spot it in the morning. She said, with painful jagged edges on her voice, “My husband doesn’t. He can’t understand what I’m upset about. Twenty years since I saw her, and I’m in bits . . . He said for me to pull myself together, before I upset the baba. My ma’s on the Valium, and my da thinks I should be looking after her, she’s the one lost a child . . . I kept thinking about you. I thought you were the only person who maybe wouldn’t think I was being stupid.”
I said, “I’d seen Kevin for a few hours out of the last twenty-two years, and it still hurts like hell. I don’t think you’re being stupid at all.”
“I feel like I’m not the same person any more. Do you know what I mean? All my life, when people asked had I any brothers or sisters, I said, Yeah; yeah, I’ve a big sister. Now I’ll be saying, No, it’s just me. Like as if I was an only child.”
“There’s nothing to stop you telling people about her anyway.”
Nora shook her head so hard that her hair whipped her face. “No. I’m not going to lie about that. That’s the worst part: I was lying all along, and I didn’t even know it. Whenever I told people I had a sister, it wasn’t true. I was already an only child, all that time.”
I thought of Rosie, in O’Neill’s, digging in her heels at the thought of pretending we were married: No way, I’m not faking that, it’s not about what people think . . . I said gently, “I don’t mean lie. I just mean she doesn’t have to vanish. I had a big sister, you can say. Her name was Rosie. She died.”
Nora shivered, suddenly and violently. I said, “Cold?”
She shook her head and ground out her cigarette on a stone. “I’m grand. Thanks.”
“Here, give me that,” I said, taking the butt off her and tucking it back into my packet. “No good rebel leaves behind evidence of her teenage kicks for her da to find.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t know what I was getting all worked up about. It’s not like he can ground me. I’m a grown woman; if I want to leave the house, I can.”
She wasn’t looking at me any more. I was losing her. Another minute and she would remember that she was in fact a respectable thirty-something, with a husband and a kid and a certain amount of good sense, and that none of the above were compatible with smoking in a back garden at midnight with a strange man. “It’s parent voodoo,” I said, putting a wry grin on it. “Two minutes with them and you’re straight back to being a kid. My ma still puts the fear of God into me—although, mind you, she actually would give me a clatter of the wooden spoon, grown man or no. Not a bother on her.”
After a second Nora laughed, a reluctant little breath. “I wouldn’t put it past my da to try grounding me.”
“And you’d yell at him to stop treating you like a child, same as you did when you were sixteen. Like I said, parent voodoo.”
This time the laugh was a proper one, and she relaxed back onto the bench. “And someday we’ll do the same to our own kids.”
br />
I didn’t want her thinking about her kid. “Speaking of your father,” I said. “I wanted to apologize for the way my da acted, the other night.”
Nora shrugged. “There were the two of them in it.”
“Did you see what started them off ? I was chatting away with Jackie and missed all the good part. One second everything was grand, the next the two of them were setting up for the fight scene from Rocky.”
Nora adjusted her coat, tucking the heavy collar tighter around her throat. She said, “I didn’t see it either.”
“But you’ve an idea what it was about. Don’t you?”
“Men with a few drinks on them, you know yourself; and they were both after having a tough few days . . . Anything could have got them going.”
I said, with a harsh sore scrape to it, “Nora, it took me half an hour just to get my da calmed down. Sooner or later, if this keeps going, it’ll give him a heart attack. I don’t know if the bad blood between them is my fault, if it’s because I went out with Rosie and your da wasn’t happy about it; but if that’s the problem, I’d at least like to know, so I can do something about it before it kills my father.”
“God, Francis, don’t be saying that! No way is it your fault!” She was wide-eyed, fingers wrapped round my arm: I had hit the right mix of guilt-tripped and guilt-tripper. “Honest to God, it’s not. The two of them never got on. Even back when I was a little young one, way before you ever went out with Rosie, my da never . . .”
She dropped the sentence like a hot coal, and her hand came off my arm. I said, “He never had a good word to say about Jimmy Mackey. Is that what you were going to say?”
Nora said, “The other night, that wasn’t your fault. That’s all I was saying.”
“Then whose bloody fault was it? I’m lost here, Nora. I’m in the dark and I’m drowning and nobody will lift one finger to help me out. Rosie’s gone. Kevin’s gone. Half the Place thinks I’m a murderer. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I came to you because I thought you were the one person who would have some clue what I’m going through. I’m begging you, Nora. Tell me what the hell is going on.”
I can multitask; the fact that I was aiming to push her buttons didn’t stop me from meaning just about every word. Nora watched me; in the near dark her eyes were enormous and troubled. She said, “I didn’t see what started the two of them off, Francis. If I had to guess, but, I’d say it was that your da was talking to my ma.”
And there it was. Just that quickly, like gears interlocking and starting to move, dozens of little things going right back to my childhood spun and whirred and clicked neatly into place. I had thought up a hundred possible explanations, each one more involved and unlikely than the last—Matt Daly ratting out one of my da’s less legal activities, some hereditary feud going back to who stole whose last potato during the Famine—but I had never thought of the one thing that starts practically every fight between two men, specially the truly vicious ones: a woman. I said, “The two of them had a thing together.”
I saw her lashes flutter, quick and embarrassed. It was too dark to tell, but I would have bet she was blushing. “I think so, yeah. No one’s ever said it to me straight out, but . . . I’m almost sure.”
“When?”
“Ah, ages ago, before they were married—it wasn’t an affair, nothing like that. Just kid stuff.”
Which, as I knew better than most people, never stopped anything from mattering. “And then what happened?”
I waited for Nora to describe unspeakable acts of violence, probably involving strangulation, but she shook her head. “I don’t know, Francis. I don’t. Like I said, nobody ever talked to me about it; I just figured it out on my own, from bits and bobs.”
I leaned over and jammed out my smoke on the gravel, shoved it back in the packet. “Now this,” I said, “I didn’t see coming. Color me stupid.”
“Why . . . ? I wouldn’t’ve thought you’d care.”
“You mean, why do I care about anything that happened around here, when I couldn’t be arsed coming back for twenty-odd years?”
She was still gazing at me, worried and bewildered. The moon had come out; in the cold half-light the garden looked pristine and unreal, like some symmetrical suburban limbo. I said, “Nora, tell me something. Do you think I’m a murderer?”
It scared me shitless, how badly I wanted her to say no. That was when I knew I should get up and leave—I already had everything she could give me, every extra second was a bad idea. Nora said, simply and matter-offactly, “No. I never did.”
Something twisted inside me. I said, “Apparently a lot of people do.”
She shook her head. “Once, when I was just a wee little young one—five or six, maybe—I had one of Sallie Hearne’s cat’s kittens out in the street to play with, and a bunch of big fellas came along and took it away, to tease me. They were throwing it back and forth, and I was screaming . . . Then you came and made them stop: got the kitten for me, told me to take it back to Hearne’s. You wouldn’t remember.”
“I do, yeah,” I said. The wordless plea in her eyes: she needed the two of us to share that memory, and of all the things she needed that was the only tiny one I could give. “Of course I remember.”
“Someone who’d do that, I can’t see him hurting anyone; not on purpose. Maybe I’m just stupid.”
That twist again, more painful. “Not stupid,” I said. “Just sweet. The sweetest thing.”
In that light she looked like a girl, like a ghost, she looked like a breath-taking black-and-white Rosie escaped for one thin slice of time from a flickering old film or a dream. I knew if I touched her she would vanish, turn back into Nora in the blink of an eye and be gone for good. The smile on her lips could have pulled my heart out of my chest.
I touched her hair, only, with the tips of my fingers. Her breath was quick and warm against the inside of my wrist. “Where have you been?” I said softly, close to her mouth. “Where have you been all this time?”
We clutched at each other like wild lost kids, on fire and desperate. My hands knew the soft hot curves of her hips by heart, their shape rose up to meet me from some fathoms-deep place in my mind that I had thought was lost forever. I don’t know who she was looking for; she kissed me hard enough that I tasted blood. She smelled like vanilla. Rosie used to smell of lemon drops and sun and the airy solvent they used in the factory to clean stains off the cloth. I dug my fingers deep into Nora’s rich curls and felt her breasts heave against my chest, so that for a second I thought she was crying.
She was the one who broke away. She was crimson-cheeked and breathing hard, pulling down her jumper. She said, “I’ve to go in now.”
I said, “Stay,” and took hold of her again.
For a second I swear she thought about it. Then she shook her head and detached my hands from her waist. She said, “I’m glad you came tonight.”
Rosie would have stayed. I almost said it; I would have, if I had thought there was a chance it would do me any good. Instead I leaned back on the bench, took a deep breath and felt my heart start to slow down. Then I turned Nora’s hand over and kissed her palm. “So am I,” I said. “Thank you for coming out to me. Now go inside, before you have me driven mad. Sweet dreams.”
Her hair was tumbled and her lips were full and tender from kissing. She said, “Safe home, Francis.” Then she stood up and walked back up the garden, pulling her coat around her.
She slipped into the house and closed the door behind her without once looking back. I sat there on the bench, watching her silhouette move in the lamplight behind her bedroom curtain, till my knees stopped shaking and I could climb over the walls and head for home.
17
The answering machine had a message from Jackie, asking me to give her a ring: “Nothing important, now. Just . . . ah, you know yourself. Bye.” She sounded drained and older than I had ever heard her. I was wrecked enough myself that a part of me was actually scared to leave it overnight, given what had
happened when I ignored Kevin’s messages, but it was some ungodly hour of the morning; the phone would have given her and Gavin matching heart attacks. I went to bed. When I pulled off my jumper I could still smell Nora’s hair on the collar.
Wednesday morning I woke up late, around ten, feeling several notches more exhausted than I had the night before. It had been a few years since I’d been in top-level pain, mental or physical. I had forgotten just how much it takes out of you. I stripped off a layer or two of brain fluff with cold water and black coffee, and phoned Jackie.
“Ah, howya, Francis.”
Her voice still had that dulled note, even heavier. Even if I’d had the time or the energy to tackle her about Holly, I wouldn’t have had the heart. “Howya, honeybunch. I just got your message.”
“Oh . . . yeah. I thought afterwards, maybe I shouldn’t have . . . I didn’t want to give you a fright, like. Make you think anything else had happened. I just wanted . . . I don’t know. To see how you were getting on.”
I said, “I know I headed off early, Monday night. I should have stuck around.”
“Maybe, yeah. Sure, it’s done now. There was no more drama, anyway: everyone had more drink, everyone sang a while longer, everyone went home.”
There was a thick layer of background noise going on: chitchat, Girls Aloud and a hair dryer. I said, “Are you at work?”
“Ah, sure. Why not. Gav couldn’t take another day off, and I didn’t fancy hanging about the flat on my own . . . Anyway, if you and Shay are right about the state of the country, I’d better keep my regulars happy, wha’?” It was meant as a joke, but she didn’t have the energy to put a bounce on it.
“Don’t push yourself, sweetheart. If you’re wrecked, go home. I’d say your regulars wouldn’t leave you for love or money.”