“That’s not pecs!” Mandy gasped. “That’s a pair of diddies!”

“They’re grand,” Ger said, injured, dropping the pose and inspecting his chest. “They’re not diddies. Here, lads, are they diddies?”

“They’re gorgeous,” I told him. “Bring them here to me and I’ll measure them for a lovely new bra.”

“Fuck off, you.”

“If I had those I’d never leave the house again.”

“Fuck off and die. What’s wrong with them?”

“Are they meant to be all squishy?” Julie wanted to know.

“Give us that back,” Ger demanded, waving a hand at Mandy for his T-shirt. “If yous don’t appreciate these, I’m putting them away again.”

Mandy dangled the T-shirt from one finger and looked at him under her lashes. “Might hang on to it for a souvenir.”

“Janey Mac, the smell off that,” Imelda said, batting it away from her face. “Mind yourself: I’d say you could get pregnant just touching that yoke.”

Mandy shrieked and threw the T-shirt at Julie, who caught it and shrieked louder. Ger made a grab for it, but Julie ducked under his arm and jumped up: “’Melda, catch!” Imelda caught the shirt one-handed on her way up, twisted away from Zippy when he got an arm around her and was out the door in a flash of long legs and long hair, waving his shirt behind her like a banner. Ger went thumping after her and Des held out a hand to pull me up on his way past, but Rosie was leaning back against the wall and laughing, and I wasn’t moving until she did. Julie was tugging down her pencil skirt on her way out, Mandy threw Rosie a wicked look over her shoulder and called, “Hang on, yous, wait for me!” and then all of a sudden the room was quiet and it was just me and Rosie, smiling a little at each other across the spilled bonbons and the near-empty cider bottles and the curls of leftover smoke.

My heart was going like I had been running. I couldn’t remember the last time we had been alone together. I said-I had some confused idea about showing her I wasn’t planning a lunge-“Will we go after them?”

Rosie said, “I’m grand here. Unless you want to…?”

“Ah, no; no. I can live without getting my hands on Ger Brophy’s shirt.”

“He’ll be lucky to get it back. In one bit, anyway.”

“He’ll survive. He can show off his pecs on the walk home.” I tipped one of the cider bottles; there were still a few swigs left. “D’you want more?”

She held out a hand. I put one of the bottles into it-our fingers almost touched-and picked up the other. “Cheers.”

“Sláinte.”

The summer stretch had come into the evenings: it was gone seven, but the sky was a soft clear blue and the light flooding through the open windows was pale gold. All around us the Place was humming like a beehive, shimmering with a hundred different stories unfurling. Next door Mad Johnny Malone was singing to himself, in a cheerful cracked baritone: “Where the Strawberry Beds sweep down to the Liffey, you’ll kiss away the worries from my brow…” Downstairs Mandy shrieked delightedly, there was a tumble of thumping noises and then an explosion of laughter; farther down, in the basement, someone yelled in pain and Shay and his mates sent up a savage cheer. In the street, two of Sallie Hearne’s young fellas were teaching themselves to ride a robbed bike and giving each other hassle-“No, you golf ball, you’ve to go fast or you’ll fall off, who cares if you hit things?”-and someone was whistling on his way home from work, putting in all the fancy, happy little trills. The smell of fish and chips came in at the windows, along with smart-arse comments from a blackbird on a rooftop and the voices of women swapping the day’s gossip while they brought in their washing from the back gardens. I knew every voice and every door-slam; I even knew the determined rhythm of Mary Halley scrubbing her front steps. If I had listened hard I could have picked out every single person woven into that summer-evening air, and told you every story.

Rosie said, “So tell us: what really happened with Ger and the girder?”

I laughed. “I’m saying nothing.”

“Wasn’t me he was trying to impress, anyway; it was Julie and Mandy. And I won’t blow his cover.”

“Swear?”

She grinned and crossed her heart with one finger, on the soft white skin just where her shirt opened. “Swear.”

“He did catch a girder that was falling. And if he hadn’t it would’ve hit Paddy Fearon, and Paddy wouldn’t’ve walked out of there tonight.”

“But…?”

“But it was sliding off a stack down in the yard, and Ger caught it just before it fell on Paddy’s toe.”

Rosie burst out laughing. “The chancer. That’s typical, d’you know that? Back when we were little young ones, like eight or nine, Ger had the lot of us convinced that he had diabetes, and if we didn’t give him the biscuits out of our school lunches, he’d die. Hasn’t changed a bit, has he?”

Downstairs Julie screamed, “Put me down!” not like she meant it. I said, “Only these days he’s after more than biscuits.”

Rosie raised her bottle. “And fair play to him.”

I asked, “Why would he not be trying to impress you, as well as the others?”

Rosie shrugged. The faintest pink flush had seeped onto her cheeks. “Maybe ’cause he knows I wouldn’t care if he did.”

“No? I thought all the girls fancied Ger.”

Another shrug. “Not my type. I’m not into the big blondie fellas.”

My heart rate went up another notch. I tried to send urgent brainwaves to Ger, who in fairness owed me one, not to put Julie down and let people head back upstairs; not for another hour or two, maybe not ever. After a moment I said, “That necklace’s lovely on you.”

Rosie said, “I’m only after getting it. It’s a bird; lookit.”

She put down the bottle, tucked her feet underneath her and got up on her knees, holding out the pendant towards me. I moved across the sun-striped floorboards and knelt facing her, closer than we had been in years.

The pendant was a silver bird, wings spread wide, tiny feathers made of iridescent abalone shell. When I bent my head over it I was shaking. I had chatted up girls before, all smart-mouthed and cocky, not a bother on me; in that second, I would have sold my soul for one clever line. Instead I said, like an idiot, “It’s pretty.” I reached out towards the pendant, and my finger touched Rosie’s.

Both of us froze. I was so close I could see that soft white skin at the base of her throat lifting with each quick heartbeat and I wanted to bury my face in it, bite it, I had no clue what I wanted to do but I knew every blood vessel in my body would explode if I didn’t do it. I could smell her hair, airy and lemony, dizzying.

It was the speed of that heartbeat that gave me the guts to look up and meet Rosie’s eyes. They were enormous, just a rim of green around black, and her lips were parted like I had startled her. She let the pendant drop. Neither one of us could move and neither one of us was breathing.

Somewhere bike bells were ringing and girls were laughing and Mad Johnny was still singing: “I love you well today, and I’ll love you more tomorrow…” All the sounds dissolved and blurred into that yellow summer air like one long sweet peal of bells. “Rosie,” I said. “Rosie.” I held out my hands to her and she matched her warm palms against mine, and when our fingers folded together and I pulled her towards me I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe my luck.

All that night, after I shut the door and left Number 16 empty, I went looking for the parts of my city that have lasted. I walked down streets that got their names in the Middle Ages: Copper Alley, Fishamble Street, Blackpitts where the plague dead were buried. I looked for cobblestones worn smooth and iron railings gone thin with rust. I ran my hand over the cool stone of Trinity’s walls and I crossed the spot where nine hundred years ago the town got its water from Patrick’s Well; the street sign still tells you so, hidden in the Irish that no one ever reads. I paid no attention to the shoddy new apartment blocks and the neon signs, the sick illusions ready to fall into brown mush like rotten fruit. They’re nothing; they’re not real. In a hundred years they’ll be gone, replaced and forgotten. This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it’s the old stuff, the stuff that’s endured, that might just keep enduring. I tilted my head up to see the delicate, ornate columns and balustrades above Grafton Street’s chain stores and fast-food joints. I leaned my arms on the Ha’penny Bridge where people used to pay half a penny to cross the Liffey, I looked out at the Custom House and the shifting streams of lights and the steady dark roll of the river under the falling snow, and I hoped to God that somehow or other, before it was too late, we would all find our way back home.