Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(84)

“Then were they poor?”

“Yeah, sweetie. We weren’t starving or anything, but we were pretty poor.”

“Like what?”

“Like we didn’t go on holidays, and we had to save up if we wanted to go to the cinema. Like I wore your uncle Shay’s old clothes and your uncle Kevin wore mine, instead of getting new ones. Like your nana and granddad had to sleep in the sitting room because we didn’t have enough bedrooms.”

She was wide-eyed, like it was a fairy tale. “Seriously?”

“Yep. Plenty of people lived like that. It wasn’t the end of the world.”

Holly said, “But.” The pink stain had turned into a full-on blush. “Chloe says poor people are skangers.”

This came as absolutely no surprise. Chloe is a simpering, bitchy, humorless little object with an anorexic, bitchy, humorless mother who talks to me loudly and slowly, using small words, because her family crawled out of the gutter a generation before mine and because her fat, bitchy, humorless husband drives a Tahoe. I always thought we should ban the whole vile bunch of them from the house; Liv said Holly would outgrow Chloe in her own good time. This lovely moment, as far as I was concerned, settled the argument once and for all.

“Right,” I said. “What does Chloe mean by that, exactly?”

I kept my voice level, but Holly is good at me and her eyes slid sideways quickly, checking my face. “It’s not a swear word.”

“It’s definitely not a nice word. What do you think it means?”

Wriggly shrug. “You know.”

“If you’re going to use a word, chick, you’ve got to have some idea what you’re saying. Come on.”

“Like stupid people. People who wear tracksuits and they don’t have jobs because they’re lazy, and they can’t even talk properly. Poor people.”

I said, “What about me? Do you think I’m stupid and lazy?”

“Not you!”

“Even though my whole family was poor as dirt.”

She was getting flustered. “That’s different.”

“Exactly. You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.”

“Chloe says her mum says it’s superimportant to make sure people know straightaway you’ve got plenty of money. Otherwise you don’t get any respect in this world.”

“Chloe and her family,” I said, hitting the end of my patience, “are vulgar enough to make your average blinged-up skanger blush.”

“What’s vulgar?”

Holly had stopped messing with the piano and was looking up at me in pure bewilderment, eyebrows pulled together, waiting for me to illuminate everything and make perfect sense of it all. For maybe the first time in her life, I had no idea what to say to her. I had no clue how to explain the difference between working poor and scumbag poor to a kid who thought everyone had a computer, or how to explain vulgar to a kid who was growing up on Britney Spears, or how to explain to anyone at all how this situation had turned into such a terminal mess. I wanted to grab hold of Olivia and get her to show me the right way to do this, except that that wasn’t Liv’s job any more; my relationship with Holly was all my own problem now. In the end I took the miniature piano out of her hand, put it back in the dollhouse and pulled her onto my lap.

Holly said, leaning back to watch my face, “Chloe’s stupid, isn’t she?”

“My God, yes,” I said. “If there was a worldwide shortage of stupid, Chloe and her family between them could fix it in a heartbeat.”

She nodded and curled in against my chest, and I tucked her head under my chin. After a while she said, “Someday will you take me and show me where Uncle Kevin fell out of the window?”

“If you feel like you need to have a look,” I said, “then sure. I’ll show you.”

“Not today, though.”

“No,” I said. “Let’s all just get through today in one piece.” We sat there on the floor in silence, me rocking Holly back and forth and her sucking pensively on the end of a plait, until Olivia came in to tell us it was time for school.





I picked up an extralarge coffee and an undefined organic-looking muffin in Dalkey—I get the sense Olivia thinks that feeding me might be taken as an invitation to move back in—and had breakfast sitting on a wall, watching overweight suits in tanks get outraged when the traffic waves didn’t part specially for them. Then I dialed my voice mail.

“Yeah, um, Frank . . . Hi. It’s Kev. Listen, I know you said this wasn’t a good time, but . . . I mean, not now, like, but whenever you’re free, can you give us a ring? Like tonight or whatever, even if it’s late, that’s OK. Um. Thanks. Bye.”

The second time, he hung up, no message. Same thing the third time, while Holly and Jackie and I were stuffing our faces with pizza. The fourth call had come in just before seven, presumably when Kevin was on his way into Ma and Da’s. “Frank, it’s me again. Listen . . . I kind of need to talk to you. I know you probably don’t want to think about any of this crap, right, but honest to God, I’m not trying to mess with your head, I just . . . Could you ring me? OK, um, I guess . . . bye.”