Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(28)
“You missed out.”
“Yeah.” Kevin glanced around dubiously. He had his hands in his pockets, keeping his jacket wrapped tightly around himself so it wouldn’t touch anything. “I’ll live. This kind of stuff is why I can’t stand it when people get nostalgic about the eighties. Kids bored to death, or playing with barbed wire, or shagging in bloody rat holes . . . What’s to miss?”
I looked at him, standing there in his Ralph Lauren logos and his snazzy watch and his slick upmarket haircut, all full up with righteous indignation and looking a thousand miles out of place. I thought of him as a skinny, cowlicky kid in my patched hand-me-downs, running wild in and out of this house without ever realizing it wasn’t good enough. I said, “There was an awful lot more to it than that.”
“Like what? What’s so great about losing your virginity in a shit hole?”
“I’m not saying I’d bring the eighties back if I had the choice, but don’t shove the baby down the plughole with the bathwater. And I don’t know about you, but I was never bored. Never. You might want to have a think about that.”
Kevin shrugged and mumbled something that sounded like, “I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.”
“Keep thinking. It’ll come to you.” I headed for the back rooms without bothering to wait for him—if he put his foot through a rotten floorboard in the shadows, that was his problem. After a moment he came sulking after me.
Nothing interesting in the back, nothing interesting in the hall-floor rooms, except a huge stash of vodka empties that someone had apparently preferred not to put out with their rubbish. At the top of the basement steps, Kevin balked. “No way. I’m not going down there. Seriously, Frank.”
“Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.”
Kevin said, “Shay locked us down there once. You and me—I was only little. Do you remember that?”
“Nope. Is that why this place gives you the vapors?”
“It does not give me the f*cking vapors. I just don’t see why we’re trying to get ourselves buried alive for no bloody reason at all.”
I said, “Then wait for me outside.”
After a moment he shook his head. He followed me for the same reason I had wanted him there to begin with: old habits last.
I had been down in that basement maybe three times, total. The local urban legend claimed that someone called Slasher Higgins had slit his deaf-mute brother’s throat and buried him down there; if you invaded Gimpy Higgins’s territory he would come for you, waving his rotting hands and making terrible grunting sounds, cue demonstration. The Higgins brothers had probably been invented by worried parents and none of us believed in them, but we still stayed out of the basement. Shay and his mates sometimes hung out down there to show what hard men they were, and a couple might go there if they were truly desperate for a shag and all the other rooms were otherwise occupied, but the good stuff happened upstairs: the ten-packs of Marlboros and the cheap two-liter bottles of cider, the matchstick-thin spliffs and the games of strip poker that never got more than halfway. Once when Zippy Hearne and I were about nine we dared each other to touch the back wall of the basement, and I had a vague memory of bringing Michelle Nugent down there a few years later, in the hope that it would scare her enough to make her grab hold of me and possibly snog me. No such luck; even at that age I went for girls who didn’t scare easy.
The other time had been when Shay locked the two of us in. He’d left us there for what was probably an hour; it felt like days. Kevin had been two or three, and he had been too terrified even to scream. He had pissed his kacks instead. I had told him it would be OK, tried to kick the door down, tried to pry the boards off the windows with my fingers, and sworn to myself that someday I would beat the living shit out of Shay.
I moved the torch in a slow sweep. The basement was a lot like I remembered it, except that now I could see exactly why our parents might have had issues with us hanging out here. The windows were still boarded up, badly, with thin stripes of pale light falling in between the slats; the ceiling was bulging in a way I didn’t like, and great chunks of plaster had fallen away so that the beams showed, bent and splintering. The dividing walls had buckled and crumbled till it was basically all one huge room, and in places the floor was collapsing in on itself, sagging into the foundations—subsidence, maybe, with nothing to prop the house up on the end-of-terrace side. A very long time ago someone had made an unimpressive effort, before giving up on the place altogether, to patch up a few of the more major holes by shoving slabs of concrete into them and hoping for the best. The place smelled like I remembered—piss, mold and dirt—only more so. “Ah, man,” Kevin muttered unhappily, hovering at the bottom of the stairs. “Ah, man . . .” His voice echoed off into the far corners, bouncing off walls at odd angles so that it sounded like someone was murmuring, away in the dark. He winced and shut up.
Two of the concrete slabs were man-sized, and whoever had put them in had slapped lumpy cement around the edges, for the satisfaction of a job well done. The third one was even more half-arsed: just a lopsided chunk, maybe four feet by three, and f*ck the cement.
“Right,” Kevin said, a notch too loudly, behind me. “There you go. The gaff is still here and it’s still a dive. Can we go now, yeah?”