Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(137)

I got my pint in and we sat there, elbows on the bar, drinking and not looking at each other. After a while Shay said, I’ve been trying for years to think of a way out.

I know. Same here.

Sometimes, he said. Sometimes I think maybe, if I don’t find one, I’ll go mental.

This was the closest to an intimate brotherly conversation the two of us had ever had. It startled me, how good it felt. I said, I’m going mental already. No maybe about it. I can feel it.

He nodded, with no surprise. Yeah. Carmel is, too.

And there’s days Jackie doesn’t look right. After he’s had a bad one. She goes spaced out.

Kevin’s all right.

For now. As far as we can tell.

Shay said, It’d be the best thing we could ever do for them, too. Not just for us.

I said, Unless I’m missing something, it’s the only thing. Not just the best. The only.

Our eyes finally met. The pub had got noisier; someone’s voice rose to a punch line and the corner exploded in rowdy, dirty laughter. Neither of us blinked. Shay said, I’ve thought about this before. A couple of times.

I’ve been thinking about it for years. Thinking’s easy. Doing it . . .

Yeah. Whole different thing. It’d be . . . Shay shook his head. He had rings of white around his eyes, and his nostrils flared every time he breathed.

I said, Would we be able?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Another long silence, while we both replayed our very favorite father-son moments in our heads. Yeah, we said, simultaneously. We would.

Shay held out his hand to me. His face was white and red in patches. OK, he said, on a fast breath. OK. I’m in. Are you?

I’m in, I said, and slapped my hand into his. We’re on.

We both gripped like we were trying to do damage. I could feel that moment swelling, spreading outwards, rippling into every corner. It was a dizzy, sweet-sick feeling, like shooting up some drug that you knew would leave you crippled for life, but the high was so good that all you could think of was getting it deeper into your veins.

That spring was the only time in our lives when Shay and I voluntarily went near each other. Every few nights, we found ourselves a nice private corner of the Blackbird and we talked: turned the plan over to examine it from every angle, fined off the rough edges, scrapped anything that wouldn’t work and started over. We still hated each other’s guts, but that had stopped mattering.

Shay spent evening after evening schmoozing Nuala Mangan from Copper Lane: Nuala was a hound and an idiot, but her ma had the finest glazed look around, and after a few weeks Nuala invited Shay home for tea and he nicked a nice big handful of Valium from the bathroom cabinet. I spent hours in the Ilac Centre library, reading medical books, trying to work out how much Valium you would have to slip to a two-hundred-pound woman or a seven-year-old kid to make sure they slept through a certain amount of ruckus, one night, and still woke up when you needed them to. Shay walked all the way to Ballyfermot, where no one knew him and the cops would never go asking, to buy bleach for clean-up. I had a sudden burst of helpfulness and started giving Ma a hand with the dessert every night—Da made nasty comments about me turning into a poof, but every day we were getting closer and the comments were getting easier to ignore. Shay swiped a crowbar from work and hid it under the floorboard with our smokes. We were good at this, the pair of us. We had a knack. We made a good team.

Call me twisted, but I loved that month we spent planning. I had some hassle sleeping, every now and then, but a big part of me was having a blast. It felt like being an architect, or a film director: someone with long-range vision, someone with plans. For the first time ever, I was engineering something huge and complex that, if I could just get it right, would be utterly, utterly worthwhile.

Then all of a sudden someone offered Da two weeks’ work, which meant that on the last night he would be coming home at two in the morning with a blood-alcohol level that would stop any cop’s suspicions in their tracks, and there were no excuses left for waiting. We were on our final countdown: two weeks to go.

We had run over our alibi till we could have recited it in our sleep. Family dinner, finished off with yummy sherry trifle, courtesy of my new domestic streak—sherry not only dissolved the Valium better than water, it masked the taste, and individual trifles meant personalized doses. Up to the disco at the Grove, over on the northside, in search of a fresh pool of lovely ladies to fish in; getting thrown out by midnight, as memorably as possible, for being loud and obnoxious and for sneaking in our own cans; walking home, stopping along the way to finish off our contraband cans on the banks of the canal. Home around three, when the Valium should have started wearing off, to the shocking sight of our beloved father lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of his own blood. Then came the much too late mouth-to-mouth, the frantic banging on the Harrison sisters’ door, the wild phone call for an ambulance. Just about everything, except the stop for refreshment, was going to be true.

Probably we would have got caught. Natural talent or no, we were amateurs: there were too many things we had missed, and way too many that could have gone wrong. Even at the time, I half knew that. I didn’t care. We had a chance.

We were ready. In my head, I was already living every day as a guy who had killed his own da. And then Rosie Daly and I went to Galligan’s one night, and she said England.

I didn’t tell Shay why I was pulling the plug. At first he thought I was having some kind of sick joke. Slowly, as it dawned on him that I meant it, he got more frantic. He tried bullying, tried threatening, he even tried begging. When none of those worked, he got me by the neck, hauled me out of the Blackbird and beat the shite out of me—it was a week before I could walk upright. I hardly fought back; deep down, I figured he had a right. When he finally exhausted himself and collapsed beside me in the laneway, I could barely see him through the blood, but I think he might have been crying.