The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(98)

‘The kids are used to this light, but. And an actual ghost? Is that what you saw?’

‘Nah. Bit of shadow, just.’

‘Exactly. They’re seeing Chris because they want to. Feeding off each other, trying to impress each other, give each other something good.’ She shoved the jacket back into the wardrobe. ‘They need to get out more, this lot. They spend too much time together.’

Nothing down behind Gemma’s bedside table, nothing under the drawer. ‘At this age, that’s what it’s about.’

‘Yeah, they’re not gonna be this age forever. When it hits them that there’s a great big world out there, they’re gonna get the shock of their lives.’

The scraping of satisfaction on her voice, I didn’t feel that. Instead I felt the wind that would hit you from every side, raw-edged and gritty, smelling of spices and petrol, whirling hot in your hair, when you stepped out of a place like this and the door slammed behind you.

I said, ‘I’d say Chris getting murdered made the great big world hard to miss.’

‘You think? Even that was all about each other, for these. “Look, I cried harder than her, so I’m a better person.” “We all saw his ghost together, look how close we are.”’

I moved on to Orla’s bed. Conway said, ‘I remember you from training.’

Her head was in the wardrobe, I couldn’t see her face. I said – carefully, skimming back – ‘Yeah? Good or bad?’

‘You don’t remember, no?’

If I’d talked to her beyond ‘Howya’ in corridors, I’d forgotten. ‘Tell me I didn’t make you do pushups.’

‘Would you remember if you had?’

‘Ah, Jaysus. What’d I do?’

‘Relax the kacks. I’m just wrecking your head.’ I could hear the grin in Conway’s voice. ‘You never did anything on me.’

‘Thank f*ck. You had me worried there.’

‘Nah, you were grand. I don’t think we ever even talked. I only clocked you to start with because of the hair.’ Conway pulled something out of a hoodie pocket, grimaced: wad of tissues. ‘After that, but, I kept noticing because you did your own thing. You had mates, but you weren’t hanging out of anyone. All the rest, f*ck me: they spent the whole time crawling up each other’s hole. Half of them trying to network, like the little bastards at Colm’s: if I get all buddy-buddy with the Commissioner’s kid, I’ll never have to do traffic duty and I’ll make Inspector by thirty. The other half trying to bond, like this lot here: oh, these are the best days of our lives and we’ll all be best pals forever and tell these stories at our retirement dinners. I was like, what the f*ck? You’re grown adults; you’re here to learn the job, not to swap friendship bracelets and do each other’s eyeshadow.’ She shoved clothes down the crowded rail. ‘I liked that you didn’t get sucked into that either.’

I didn’t tell her: a part of me watched my classmates bonding away like goodo, and wished. Just like Conway said, it was my own choice that I wasn’t in there swapping friendship bracelets with the best of them. Mostly that made it OK.

I said, ‘If you think back, we were kids; only a couple of years older than this lot. People wanted to belong. Nothing strange there.’

Conway thought, unrolling tights. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s not the making friends that gets on my tits. Everyone needs those. But I had mine back at home. Still do.’

Glance at me. I said, ‘Yeah.’

‘Right. So you didn’t need to go chasing more. If you make friends inside some bubble that’s going to burst on you in a couple of years – like training, or like here – you’re an idiot. You start thinking that’s the whole world, nowhere else exists, then you end up with all this hysterical shite. Best friends forever, she-said-you-said-I-said wars, everyone working themselves into fits over they don’t even know what. Nothing’s just normal; everything’s right up here, all the time.’

Hand above head level. I thought of the Murder squad room. Wondered if Conway was thinking of it too.

‘Then you head out into the big bad world,’ she said, ‘everything looks different all of a sudden, and you’re f*cked.’

I ran a hand under the slats of Joanne’s bed-frame. ‘Orla and Alison, you mean? No way Joanne’s going to be hanging out with them in college.’

Conway snorted. ‘Yeah, not a chance. Here, they’re useful; out there, they’ll be gone. And they’ll be devastated. I wasn’t thinking of them, though. I meant the gangs that actually genuinely care about each other. Like your Holly and her mates.’

‘I’d say they’ll still be mates on the outside.’ I hoped so. That something special, gilding the air. You want to believe it’ll last forever.

‘Could be. Probably, even. That’s not the point. The point is, right now, they don’t give a f*ck about anyone except each other. Great, that’s cute, I bet they’re delighted with themselves.’ Conway threw a handful of bras back into a drawer, slammed it. ‘But when they get out there? That’s not going to be an option any more. They won’t be able to hang out of each other’s hole twenty-four-seven, ignore everyone else. Other people are going to start mattering, whether these four like that or not. The rest of the world’s gonna be there. It’s gonna be real. And that’s gonna f*ck up their heads like they can’t even imagine.’