Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(103)
Ma’s head snapped up and she stared at me. Her face didn’t change, but an awful lot of things were zipping across her eyes. “Where’d you hear that?” she demanded.
“So he was with her.”
“Your da’s a fecking eejit. You knew that already, or you’re as bad.”
“I did, yeah. I just didn’t know that was one of the specific ways he was a fecking eejit.”
“She was always trouble, that one. Always drawing attention to herself, wiggling down the road, screaming and carrying on with her friends.”
“And Da fell for it.”
“They all fell for it! The fellas are stupid; they go mad for all that. Your da, and Matt Daly, and half the fellas in the Liberties, all hanging out of Tessie O’Byrne’s arse. She lapped it up: kept three or four of them dangling at once, broke it off with them every other week when they weren’t giving her enough attention. They just came crawling back for more.”
“We don’t know what’s good for us,” I said. “Specially when we’re young. Da would’ve been only a young fella back then, wouldn’t he?”
Ma sniffed. “Old enough to know better. I was three years younger, sure, and I could’ve told him it would end in tears.”
I said, “You’d already spotted him, yeah?”
“I had, yeah. God, yeah. You wouldn’t think . . .” Her fingers had slowed on the widget. “You wouldn’t think it now, but he was only gorgeous, your da was, back then. A load of curly hair on him, and those blue eyes, and the laugh; he’d a great laugh.”
We both glanced involuntarily out the kitchen door, towards the bedroom. Ma said, and you could still hear that the name used to taste like superfancy ice cream in her mouth, “Jimmy Mackey could’ve had his pick of any girl around.”
I gave her a little smile. “And he didn’t go straight for you?”
“I was a child, sure. I was fifteen when he started chasing after Tessie O’Byrne, and I wasn’t like these young ones nowadays that look twenty before they’re twelve; I’d no figure on me, no makeup, I hadn’t a clue . . . I used to try and catch his eye when I’d see him on my way to work in the morning, but he’d never look twice. He was mad on Tessie. And she liked him best of the lot.”
I had never heard any of this before, and I was willing to bet that Jackie hadn’t either, or she would have passed it on. Ma isn’t the let’s-all-share-our-feelings type; if I had asked her about this story a week earlier or later, I would have got nowhere. Kevin had left her fractured and peeled raw. You use what you’ve got. “So why did they break up?” I asked.
Ma’s mouth pursed up. “If you want to do that silver, do it properly. Get into the cracks. There’s no point if I’ll have to do the lot again after you.”
I said, “Sorry,” and upped the display of elbow grease. After a moment she said, “I’m not saying your da was a holy innocent. Tessie O’Byrne never had a bit of shame, but there was the pair of them in it.”
I waited, rubbing away. Ma caught my wrist and pulled it towards her to check the shine on the frame; then she gave a grudging little nod and let go. “That’s better. Things weren’t the same, back then. We had a bit of decency about us; we weren’t riding all round us just because that’s what they did on the telly.”
I inquired, “Da rode Tessie O’Byrne on the telly?”
That got me a clout on the arm. “No! Amn’t I telling you, if you’ll only listen to me? They were always wild, the pair of them. Made each other worse. One day in summer your da borrowed a car off a friend of his and drove Tessie down to Powerscourt on a Sunday afternoon, to see the waterfall. Only the car broke down, on the way back.”
Or that had been Da’s story. Ma was giving me a meaningful look. “And?” I asked.
“And they stayed there! Overnight! We’d no mobile phones back then; they couldn’t ring for a mechanic, or even to let anyone know what was after happening. They tried walking for a bit, but they were out in a lane in the middle of Wicklow, sure, and it was getting dark. They stayed in the car, and the next morning they got a jump start off a farmer going past. By the time they got home, everyone thought they were after eloping.”
She tilted the silver widget to the light, to check that the finish was perfect and to stretch the pause—Ma always did have a taste for drama. “Well. Your da always said to me he slept in the front seat and Tessie slept in the back. I wouldn’t know, sure. But that’s not what the Place thought.”
I said, “I bet it wasn’t.”
“Girls didn’t stay out with fellas, back then. Only slappers did that. I’d never known a girl who did the bold thing before she was married.”
“I’d have thought the two of them would’ve had to get married, after that. To preserve her reputation.”
Ma’s face closed over. She said, with a sniff in her voice, “I’d say your da would’ve done it, he was that mental about her, the fecking eejit. But he wasn’t good enough for the O’Byrnes—they always did have notions of themselves. Tessie’s da and her uncles bet the living shite out of him; I saw him the day after, I hardly recognized him. They told him not to be going near her again. Said he’d done enough damage.”