Isabelle glanced round, making sure there were people near and ready to come to the rescue, before she said-nice and loud, so those same people could hear her-“Take your telly and shove it up your hole.”
She jumped back, quick and agile as a cat, in case I went for her. Then she gave me the finger to make sure no one missed the message, spun on her spike heel and stalked off down Hallows Lane. I watched while she found her keys, vanished into the hive of old brick and lace curtains and watching eyes, and slammed the door behind her.
The snow started that evening. I had left the telly at the top of Hallows Lane for Deco’s next client to steal, taken the car back home and started walking; I was down by Kilmainham Gaol when the first rush came tumbling to meet me, great perfect silent flakes. Once it started, it kept on coming. It was gone almost as soon as it touched the ground, but Dublin can go years without even that much, and outside James’s Hospital it had turned a big gang of students giddy: they were having a snowball war, scraping handfuls off cars stopped at the lights and hiding behind innocent bystanders, red-nosed and laughing, not giving a fuck about the outraged suits huffing and flouncing on their way home from work. Later, couples got romantic on it, tucking their hands in each other’s pockets, leaning together and tilting their heads back to watch the flakes whirl down. Even later, drunks picked their way home from the pubs with triple-extra-special care.
It was somewhere deep inside the night when I wound up at the top of Faithful Place. All the lights were out, just one Star of Bethlehem twinkling in Sallie Hearne’s front window. I stood in the shadows where I had stood to wait for Rosie, digging my hands into my pockets and watching the wind sweep graceful arcs of snowflakes through the yellow circle of lamplight. The Place looked cozy and peaceful as a Christmas card, tucked in for the winter, dreaming of sleigh bells and hot cocoa. On all the street there wasn’t a sound, only the shush of snow being blown against walls and the faraway notes of church bells ringing some quarter hour.
A light glimmered in the front room of Number 3, and the curtains slid open: Matt Daly, in his pajamas, dark against the faint glow of a table lamp. He leaned his hands on the windowsill and watched the snowflakes falling on cobblestones for a long time. Then his shoulders rose and fell on a deep breath, and he pulled the curtains closed. After a moment the light clicked out.
Even without him watching, I couldn’t make myself take that step into the Place. I went over the end wall, into the garden of Number 16.
My feet crunched on pebbles and frozen weeds still holding on in the dirt where Kevin had died. Down in Number 8, Shay’s windows were dark and hollow. No one had bothered to close his curtains.
The back door of Number 16 was swinging open on blackness, creaking restlessly when the wind caught it. I stood in the doorway, watching the dim snow-blue light filtering down the stairs and my breath drifting on the frozen air. If I had believed in ghosts, that house would have been the let-down of a lifetime: it should have been thick with them, soaking the walls, cramming the air, keening and flittering in every high corner, but I had never seen anywhere that empty, empty enough to suck the breath out of you. Whatever I had come looking for-Scorcher, bless his predictable little heart, would presumably have suggested closure or some equivalent chunk of arsebiscuit-it wasn’t there. A sprinkle of snowflakes swirled in over my shoulder, lay for a second on the floorboards and were gone.
I thought about taking something away with me or leaving something behind, just for the sake of it, but I had nothing worth leaving and there was nothing I wanted to take. I found an empty crisp packet in the weeds, folded it and used it to jam the door shut. Then I went back over the wall and started walking again.
I was sixteen, in that top room, when I first touched Rosie Daly. It was a Friday evening in summer: a gang of us, a couple of big bottles of cheap cider, twenty SuperKing Lights and a pack of strawberry bonbons-we were that young. We had been picking up days on the building sites on our school holidays, me and Zippy Hearne and Des Nolan and Ger Brophy, so we were brown and muscly and in the money, laughing louder and wider, thrumming with all that brand-new manhood and telling amped-up work stories to impress the girls. The girls were Mandy Cullen and Imelda Tierney and Des’s sister Julie, and Rosie.
For months she had slowly been turning into my own secret magnetic north. At nights I lay in bed and was sure I felt her, through the brick walls and across the cobblestones, drawing me towards her down the long tides of her dreams. Being this close to her pulled at me so hard I could barely breathe-we were all sitting against the walls, and my legs were stretched out so near Rosie’s that if I had moved just a few inches, my calf would have been pressed to hers. I didn’t need to look at her; I could feel every move she made right inside my skin, I knew when she pushed her hair behind her ear or shifted her back against the wall to get the sun on her face. When I did look, she made my head stop working.
Ger was sprawled on the floor, giving the girls a dramatic based-on-a-true-story account of how he had single-handedly caught an iron girder that had been about to plummet three stories onto someone’s head. All of us were half giddy, on the cider and the nicotine and the company. We had known each other since we were in diapers, but that was the summer when things were changing, faster than we could keep up. Julie had a stripe of blusher down each plump cheek, Rosie had on a new silver pendant that flashed in the sun, Zippy’s voice had finally finished breaking, and all of us were wearing body spray.
“-And then your man says to me, ‘Son,’ he says, ‘if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be walking out of here on my own two feet today-’”
“D’you know what I smell?” Imelda asked no one in particular. “Bollix. Lovely fresh bollix.”
“And you’d recognize those,” Zippy said, grinning at her.
“Dream on. If I ever recognized yours, I’d top meself.”
“It’s not bollix,” I told her. “I was standing right there, saw the whole thing. I’m telling yous, girls, this fella’s a real-life hero.”
“Hero, me arse,” Julie said, nudging Mandy. “The state of him. He wouldn’t have the strength to catch a football, never mind a girder.”
Ger flexed a bicep. “Come over here and say that, you.”
“Not bad,” Imelda said, lifting an eyebrow and tapping ash into an empty can. “Now show us your pecs.”
Mandy squealed. “You dirtbird, you!”
“You’re the dirtbird,” Rosie said. “Pecs is just his chest. What’d you think it was?”
“Where’d you learn words like that?” Des demanded. “I never heard of these pec yokes before.”
“The nuns,” Rosie told him. “They showed us pictures and all. In biology, you know?”
For a second Des looked gobsmacked; then he copped on and threw a bonbon at Rosie. She caught it neatly, tossed it into her mouth and laughed at him. I thought about punching him, but I couldn’t come up with a good excuse.
Imelda gave Ger a little cat grin. “So are we seeing them or not?”
“D’you dare me?”
“I do, yeah. Go on.”
Ger winked at us. Then he stood up, wiggled his eyebrows at the girls and inched his T-shirt coyly up his belly. All of us whooped; the girls started giving him the slow clap. He peeled off the T-shirt, whirled it around his head, tossed it at them and struck a muscle-man pose.
The girls were laughing too hard to keep clapping. They were collapsed together in the corner, heads on each other’s shoulders, holding their stomachs. Imelda was wiping away tears. “You sexy beast, you-”
“Ah, God, I think I’m after rupturing myself-” from Rosie.