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.”

“So you left. Even without her.”

I said, “I figured I’d paid my way out.”

“I wondered about that. Why you didn’t just come home.”

“If I’d had the money, I’d have hopped straight on a plane to Australia. The farther the better.”

Jackie asked, “Do you still blame them? Or was that just the drink talking, last night?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I do. The whole lot of them. That’s probably unfair, but sometimes life can just be a big old bitch.”

My phone beeped: text message. Hi frank, kev here, not meanin 2 hassle u cos i no u r a busy man but when u get a chance give us a bell ok? Could do w a chat. Thx. I deleted it.

Jackie said, “But what if she wasn’t walking out on you after all? If that never happened?”

I didn’t have an answer for that one-a big part of my head didn’t even understand the question-and it felt decades too late to go looking for one. I ignored Jackie till she shrugged and started refurbishing her lipstick. I watched Holly spin in great crazy circles as the swing chains untwisted, and I very carefully thought about exactly nothing except whether she needed to put on her scarf, how long it would be before she simmered down enough to be hungry, and what I wanted on my pizza.

10

We had our pizza, Jackie headed off to show Gavin some love, and Holly begged me into taking her to the Christmas ice rink in Ballsbridge. Holly skates like a fairy and I skate like a gorilla with neurological issues, which of course is a bonus for her because she gets to laugh at me when I smack into walls. By the time I dropped her back at Olivia’s, both of us were happily exhausted and a little high on all those tinned Christmas carols, and both of us were in a much better mood. The sight of us on the doorstep, sweaty and messy and grinning, even wrung a reluctant smile out of Liv. I headed into town and had a couple of pints with the lads, I went home-Twin Peaks had never looked prettier-and took out a few nests of zombies on the Xbox, and I went to sleep loving the thought of a nice ordinary day’s work so much that I thought I just might start off the next morning by snogging my office door.

I was right to enjoy the normal world while I had it. Deep down, even while I was shaking my fist at the sky and vowing never to darken the cobbles of that hellhole again, I must have known the Place was going to take that as a challenge. It hadn’t given me permission to leave the building, and it was going to come looking for me.

It was coming up to lunchtime on Monday, and I had just finished introducing my boy with the drug-dealer situation to his brand-new granny, when my office phone rang.

“Mackey,” I said.

Brian, our squad admin, said, “Personal call for you. Do you want to take it? I wouldn’t have hassled you, only it sounds… well. Urgent. To say the least.”

Kevin again; it had to be. Still a clingy little bastard, after all this time: one day of tagging along after me and he thought he was my new bestest buddy, or my sidekick, or God only knew what. The sooner that got nipped in the bud, the better. “What the hell,” I said, rubbing the spot between my eyebrows that had suddenly started to throb. “Put him through.”

“Her,” Brian said, “and she’s not a happy camper. I just thought I’d warn you.”

It was Jackie and she was crying hard. “Francis, thank God, please, you’ve got to come-I don’t understand, I don’t know what happened, please…”

Her voice dissolved into a wail, a high thin sound way beyond anything like embarrassment or control. Something cold tightened at the back of my neck. “Jackie!” I snapped. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

I could barely understand the answer: something about the Hearnes, and the Guards, and a garden. “Jackie, I know you’re upset, but I need you to pull it together for me, just for a second. Take a deep breath and tell me what’s happened.”

She gasped for breath. “Kevin. Francis… Francis… God… it’s Kevin.”

That icy clamp again, tighter. I said, “Is he hurt?”

“He’s-Francis, oh God… He’s dead. He’s-”

“Where are you?”

“Ma’s. Outside Ma’s.”

“Is that where Kevin is?”

“Yeah-no-not here, the back, the garden, he, he…”