Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(42)
Rosie shrugged. “Fuck them too.”
“If you wanted,” I said, “we could pretend. Get goldy-looking rings, call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Just until—”
She shook her head, instantly and hard. “No. No way.”
“It’d only be for a little while, till we’ve the money to do it for real. It’d make our lives a whole lot easier.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not faking that. Either you’re married or you’re not; it’s not about what people think.”
“Rosie,” I said, and tightened my hold on her hands. “You know we’ll do it, don’t you? You know I want to marry you. There’s nothing I want more.”
That got the beginnings of a grin. “You’d better. Back when you and me started going out, I was a good girl, like the nuns taught me, and now here’s me all ready to be your fancy woman—”
“I’m serious. Listen to me. There’s plenty of people who, if they knew, they’d say you were crazy. They’d say the Mackeys are a shower of scumbags, and I’m going to take what I want off you and then leave you high and dry with a baby on your hands and your life flushed down the jacks.”
“Not a chance. It’s England; they’ve got johnnies.”
I said, “I just want to you to know you won’t regret this. Not if I can help it. I swear to God.”
Rosie said gently, “I know that, Francis.”
“I’m not my da.”
“If I thought you were, I wouldn’t be here. Now go up and get us a packet of crisps. I’m starving.”
We stayed in O’Neill’s that night till all the students had gone home and the barman started hoovering our feet. We stretched every pint as long as we could, we talked about safe easy everyday stuff, we made each other laugh. Before we walked home—separately, in case anyone spotted us, me keeping an eye on Rosie from a safe distance behind—we kissed good night for a long time, up against the back wall of Trinity. Then we stood still, wrapped around each other, pressed together from cheeks to toes. The air was so cold that it made a high fine ringing sound somewhere miles above us, like breaking crystal; her breath was hoarse and warm on my throat, her hair smelled like lemon drops and I could feel the fast shake of her heart trembling against my ribs. Then I let go of her and watched her walk away, one last time.
Of course I looked for her. The first time I was left alone with a police computer, I ran her name and birth date through it: she had never been arrested in the Republic of Ireland. This was hardly a revelation—I hadn’t expected her to turn into Ma Barker—but I spent the rest of the day on a hard edgy high, just from inching that first step along her trail. As my contacts got better, so did my searches: she hadn’t been arrested in the North, hadn’t been arrested in England or Scotland or Wales or the USA, hadn’t signed on the dole anywhere, hadn’t applied for a passport, hadn’t died, hadn’t got married. I repeated all the searches every couple of years, sticking to contacts who owed me favors. They never asked.
Mostly, these days—I got mellower after Holly came along—I hoped Rosie would turn up under the radar somewhere, living one of those straightforward, contented lives that never hit the system, remembering me every now and then with a piercing little tug as the one who might have been. Sometimes I pictured her finding me: the phone ringing in the middle of the night, the tap at my office door. I pictured us side by side on a bench in some green park, watching in a bittersweet silence while Holly swung on a climbing frame with two little redheaded boys. I pictured an endless evening in some dim pub, our heads bending closer and closer under the talk and laughter as the night got later, our fingers sliding towards each other on the battered wood of the table. I pictured every inch of what she would look like now: the crow’s-feet from smiles I hadn’t seen, the softness of her belly from kids who weren’t mine, all her life that I had missed written on her body in Braille for my hands to read. I pictured her giving me answers I had never thought of, the ones that would make sense of everything, send every jagged edge sliding smoothly into place. I pictured, believe it or not, a second chance.
Other nights, even after all this time, I still wanted what I wanted when I was twenty: to see her show up as some Domestic Violence Squad’s frequent flier, in someone’s hooker file flagged for HIV, as an overdose in a morgue in a ruthless part of London. I had read the descriptions of hundreds of Jane Does, over the years.
All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion: my second chances, my revenge, my nice thick anti-family Maginot line. Rosie Daly dumping my sorry ass had been my landmark, huge and solid as a mountain. Now it was flickering like a mirage and the landscape kept shifting around it, turning itself inside out and backwards; none of the scenery looked familiar any more.
I ordered another pint, with a double Jameson’s on the side, which as far as I could see was my only chance of making it to the morning. I couldn’t think of a single other thing that would wipe my mind clean of that image, the nightmare made of slimy brown bones curled in its burrow, trickles of earth falling onto it with a sound like tiny scurrying feet.
7
They gave me a couple of hours on my own, with a kind of delicacy I hadn’t expected, before they came looking for me. Kevin showed up first: sticking his head around the door like a kid on a hide-and-seek mission, sending a quick sly text while the barman pulled his pint, hovering and shuffling beside my table till I put him out of his misery and gestured for him to sit down. We didn’t talk. It took the girls about three minutes to join us, shaking rain off their coats and giggling and shooting sideways glances around the pub—“Jaysus,” Jackie said in what she thought was a whisper, pulling off her scarf, “I remember when we used to be dying to come in here, only because it was no girls allowed. We were better off, weren’t we?”