Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(123)
Shay, on the other hand, not so much. You don’t have to like your family, you don’t even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone. Shay had started out high-strung, spent his whole life in a context that would have turned the Dalai Lama into a gibbering wreck, and done things that wrap years’ worth of nightmares around your brain stem. There was no way he was more than a short stroll from a breakdown. Plenty of people have told me—and several of them even meant it as a compliment—that I have a God-given talent for f*cking with people’s minds; and what you can do to strangers is nothing compared to what you can do to your very own family. I was pretty near positive that, given time and dedication, I could make Shay put a noose around his neck, tie the other end to the banisters of Number 16, and go diving.
Shay had his head tilted back, eyes narrowed, watching the Hearnes move around Santa’s workshop. He said, to me, “It sounds like you’re settling back in already.”
“Does it, yeah?”
“I heard you were round Imelda Tierney’s the other day.”
“I’ve got friends in high places. Just like you do, apparently.”
“What were you looking for off Imelda? The chat or the ride?”
“Ah, now, Shay, give me some credit. Some of us have better taste than that, you know what I mean?” I threw Shay a wink and watched the sharp flash in his eye as he started to wonder.
“Stop that, you,” Jackie told me. “Don’t be passing remarks. You’re not Brad Pitt yourself, in case no one’s told you.”
“Have you seen Imelda lately? She was no prize back in the day, but my Jaysus, the state of her now.”
“A mate of mine did her once,” Shay said. “A couple of years back. He told me he got the knickers off her and, honest to God, it was like looking at ZZ Top shot in the face.”
I started to laugh and Jackie went off into a barrage of high-pitched outrage, but Carmel didn’t join in. I didn’t think she’d even heard the last part of the conversation. She was pleating her skirt between her fingers, staring down at it like she was in a trance. I said, “You all right, Melly?”
She looked up with a start. “Ah, yeah. I suppose. It just . . . Sure, yous know yourselves. It feels mad. Doesn’t it?”
I said, “It does, all right.”
“I keep thinking I’ll look up and he’ll be there; Kevin will. Just there, like, below Shay. Every time I don’t see him, I almost ask where he is. Do yous not do the same?”
I reached up a hand and gave hers a squeeze. Shay said, with a sudden flick of savagery, “The thick bastard.”
“What are you bleeding on about?” Jackie demanded. Shay shook his head and drew on his smoke.
I said, “I’d love to know the same thing.”
Carmel said, “He didn’t mean anything by it. Sure you didn’t, Shay?”
“Figure it out for yourselves.”
I said, “Why don’t you pretend we’re thick too, and spell it out for us.”
“Who says I’d have to pretend?”
Carmel started to cry. Shay said—not unkindly, but like he’d said it a few hundred times this week—“Ah, now, Melly. Come on.”
“I can’t help it. Could we not be good to each other, just this once? After everything that’s happened? Our poor little Kevin’s dead. He’s never coming back. Why are we sitting here wrecking each other’s heads?”
Jackie said, “Ah, Carmel, love. We’re only slagging. We don’t mean it.”
“Speak for yourself,” Shay told her.
I said, “We’re family, babe. This is what families do.”
“The tosspot’s right,” Shay said. “For once.”
Carmel was crying harder. “Thinking about us all sitting right here last Friday, the whole five of us . . . I was only over the moon, so I was. I never thought it’d be the last time, you know? I thought it was just the start.”
Shay said, “I know you did. Will you try and keep it together, but? For me, yeah?”
She caught a tear with a knuckle, but they kept coming. “God forgive me, I knew something bad was probably after happening to Rosie, didn’t we all? But I just tried not to think about that. D’yous think this is a comeuppance?”
All of us said, “Ah, Carmel,” at once. Carmel tried to say something else, but it got tangled up in a pathetic cross between a gulp and a huge sniff.
Jackie’s chin was starting to look a little wobbly around the edges, too. Any minute now, this was going to turn into one great big sob-fest. I said, “I’ll tell yous what I feel like shit about. Not being here last Sunday evening. The night he . . .”
I shook my head quickly, against the railings, and let it trail off. “That was our last chance,” I said, up to the dimming sky. “I should’ve been here.”
The cynical glance I got off Shay told me he wasn’t falling for it, but the girls were all big eyes and bitten lips and sympathy. Carmel fished out a hanky and put away the rest of her cry for later, now that a man needed attention. “Ah, Francis,” Jackie said, reaching up to pat my knee. “How were you to know?”
“That’s not the point. The point is, first I missed twenty-two years of him, and then I missed the last few hours anyone’s ever going to get. I just wish . . .”