Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(59)
“Obviously, yeah, there was. Unless you think I go around wrecking my kid’s afternoons for kicks.”
“She only wanted a pair of boots. What difference does it make where she saw them? That Celia Bailey one is a bit of an eejit, God bless her, but she’s harmless.”
“No she’s not. Celia Bailey is the living embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the world. She’s about as harmless as a cyanide sandwich.”
“Ah, cop on, will you. What’s the big deal? In a month’s time Holly’ll have forgotten all about her, she’ll be mad into some girl band—”
“This is not trivial shit, Jackie. I want Holly to be aware that there is a difference between truth and meaningless gibberish bullshit. She’s completely surrounded, from every angle, by people telling her that reality is one hundred percent subjective: if you really believe you’re a star then you deserve a record contract whether or not you can sing for shit, and if you really believe in weapons of mass destruction then it doesn’t actually matter whether they exist or not, and fame is the be-all and end-all because you don’t exist unless enough people are paying attention to you. I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants it to be true or how many other people are looking. Somewhere in there, for a thing to count as real, there has got to be some actual bloody reality. God knows she’s not going to learn that anywhere else. So I’m going to have to teach her all by myself. If she occasionally gets a little stroppy along the way, so be it.”
Jackie raised her eyebrows and primmed up her lips. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “I’ll just keep my mouth shut, will I?”
Both of us did that for a while. Holly had got herself a new swing and was painstakingly turning in circles to wind the chains into a snarl.
“Shay was right about one thing,” I said. “Any country that worships Celia Bailey is just about ready to go down the tubes.”
Jackie clicked her tongue. “Don’t be calling down trouble.”
“I’m not. If you ask me, a crash might not be a bad thing.”
“Jaysus, Francis!”
“I’m trying to bring up a kid, Jackie. That alone is enough to scare the living daylights out of any sane human being. Throw in the fact that I’m trying to bring her up in a setting where she’s constantly being told to think about nothing except fashion, fame and body fat, ignore the man behind the curtain and go buy yourself something pretty . . . I’m petrified, all the time. I could just about stay on top of it when she was a little kid, but every day she’s getting older and I’m getting scareder. Call me crazy, but I kind of like the thought of her growing up in a country where people occasionally have no choice but to focus on something more crucial than dick-replacement cars and Paris Hilton.”
Jackie said, with a wicked little grin pulling at the corner of her mouth, “D’you know who you sound like? Shay.”
“Sweet jumping Jesus. If I thought that was true, I’d blow my brains out.”
She gave me a long-suffering look. “I know what’s wrong with you,” she informed me. “You got a bad pint last night, and your bowels are in tatters. That does always put fellas in a mood. Am I right?”
My phone rang again: Kevin. I said, “For f*ck’s sake,” more viciously than I meant to. Giving him the number had made sense at the time, but give my family an inch and they’ll move into your house and start redecorating. I couldn’t even turn the thing off, not with people out there who could need me anytime. “If bloody Kev is always this bad at taking hints, no wonder he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
Jackie gave my arm a soothing pat. “Don’t mind him. You just let it ring there. I’ll ask him tonight was it anything important.”
“No, thanks.”
“I’d say he just wants to know when can yous meet up again.”
“I don’t know how to get this through to you, Jackie: I do not give a tinker’s damn what Kevin wants. Although if it turns out you’re right and he wants to know when we’ll meet up, you can tell him this from me, with love and kisses: never. OK?”
“Ah, Francis, stop. You know you don’t mean that.”
“I do. Believe me, Jackie, I do.”
“He’s your brother.”
“And as far as I can tell, he’s a very nice guy who I’m sure is loved by all his wide circle of friends and acquaintances. But I’m not one of them. My only connection to Kevin was an accident of nature that tossed us into the same house for a few years. Now that we don’t live there any more, he’s nothing to do with me, any more than that guy on the bench over there. The same goes for Carmel, the same goes for Shay, and the same very definitely goes for Ma and Da. We don’t know each other, we have exactly f*ck-all in common, and I can’t see any reason on God’s green earth why we would want to meet for tea and cookies.”
Jackie said, “Cop on to yourself, would you ever. You know well it’s not that simple.”
The phone rang again. “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
She poked at leftover leaves with a toe and waited for the phone to shriek itself into silence. Then she said, “Yesterday you said you blamed us for Rosie walking out on you.”