Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(60)
I took a long breath and lightened my voice. “I’m hardly going to blame you, chicken. You were barely out of diapers.”
“Is that why you don’t mind seeing me?”
I said, “I didn’t think you’d even remember that night.”
“I asked Carmel about it yesterday, after . . . I remember bits, only. All the times get mixed up together, you know yourself.”
I said, “Not that time. That one’s clear as crystal.”
It was coming up to three in the morning by the time my mate Wiggy finished moonlighting at the nightclub and showed up at the car park to give me my few bob and take over the rest of his shift. I walked home through the last raucous, staggering dregs of Saturday night, whistling softly to myself and dreaming about tomorrow and pitying every man who wasn’t me. When I turned the corner into Faithful Place, I was walking on air.
I knew straightaway, in my armpits, that something had happened. Half the windows on the street, including ours, were blazing with light. If you stood still at the top of the road and listened you could hear the voices buzzing away behind them, wound tight and giddy with excitement.
The door of our flat was scored with brand-new dents and scuff marks. In the front room there was a kitchen chair upside down against the wall, legs splayed and splintered. Carmel was on her knees on the floor, wearing her coat over a faded flowery nightie, sweeping up broken china with a dustpan and brush; her hands were shaking so hard that she kept dropping bits. Ma was planted in one corner of the sofa, breathing in heaves and dabbing at a split lip with a wet facecloth; Jackie was curled up in the other, with her thumb in her mouth and her blankie wrapped around her. Kevin was in the armchair, biting his nails and staring at nothing. Shay was leaning against the wall, shifting from foot to foot, with his hands dug deep into his pockets; his eyes had wild white rings around them, like a cornered animal’s, and his nostrils flared when he breathed. He was getting a beauty of a black eye. From the kitchen I could hear the sound of my da getting sick, in great rasping shouts, into the sink.
I said, “What happened?”
They all jumped a mile. Five pairs of eyes turned towards me, enormous and unblinking, with no expression at all. Carmel had been crying.
Shay said, “You’ve got great timing.” Nobody else said a word. After a while I took the dustpan and brush out of Carmel’s hands, guided her gently onto the sofa between Ma and Jackie, and started sweeping up. A long time after that, the noises from the kitchen changed to snores. Shay went in, quietly, and came out with the sharp knives. None of us went to bed that night.
Someone had thrown my da a nixer of his own that week: four days’ plastering work, no need to tell the dole. He had taken the extra to the pub and treated himself to all the gin he could hold. Gin makes my da sorry for himself; feeling sorry for himself makes my da mean. He had staggered back to the Place and done his little number in front of the Dalys’ house, roaring for Matt Daly to come out and fight, only this time he had taken it that step further. He had started hurling himself against the door; when that got him nowhere except into a heap on the steps, he had pulled off a shoe and started throwing it at the Dalys’ window. This was where Ma and Shay had got there and started trying to drag him inside.
Usually Da coped relatively well with the news that his evening was over, but that night he had plenty of fuel left in the tank. The rest of the road, including Kevin and Jackie, had watched from their windows while he called Ma a dried-up old cunt and Shay a worthless little faggot and Carmel, when she went out to help, a dirty whore. Ma had called him a waster and an animal and prayed he would die roaring and rot in hell. Da had told all three of them to get their hands off him or when they went to sleep that night he would slit their throats. In the meantime, he had done his level best to beat seven shades of shite out of them.
None of this was new. The difference was that, before, he had always kept it indoors. Losing that boundary felt like losing your brakes doing eighty. Carmel said, in a small flat final voice, “He’s getting worse.” No one looked at her.
Kevin and Jackie had screamed out of the window for Da to stop, Shay had screamed at them to get back inside, Ma had screamed at them that this was all their fault for driving their da to drink, Da had screamed at them to just wait till he got up there. Finally, someone—and the Harrison sisters were the only ones on the road who had a phone—had called the Guards. That was a no-no right up there with giving heroin to small children or swearing in front of the priest. My family had managed to push the Harrison sisters all the way out to the other side of that taboo.
Ma and Carmel had begged the uniforms not to take Da—the disgrace of it—and they had been sweet enough to oblige. For plenty of cops, back then, domestic violence was like vandalizing your own property: a dumb idea, but probably not a crime. They had dragged Da up the stairs, dumped him on the kitchen floor and left.
Jackie said, “It was a bad one, all right.”
I said, “I figured that was what did it for Rosie. All her life, her da’s been warning her about what a shower of filthy savages the Mackeys are. She’s ignored him, she’s fallen in love with me, she’s told herself I’m different. And then, right when she’s a few hours away from putting her whole life into my hands, right when every minuscule doubt in her mind has to be a thousand times its normal size, here come the Mackeys to demonstrate Daddy’s point in living color: putting on a holy show for the entire neighborhood, howling and brawling and biting and throwing shite like a troop of baboons on PCP. She had to wonder what I was like behind closed doors. She had to wonder if, deep down, I was one of them. She had to wonder just how long that would take to surface.”