I leaned back against the wall and ran my hands over my face. Jackie watched me sideways and drank my Guinness. Eventually she asked, tentatively, “Will we go back out, will we?”
I said, “Did you ever ask Kevin what he wanted to talk to me about?”
Her face fell. “Ah, Francis, I’m sorry-I would’ve, only you said…”
“I know what I said.”
“Did he not get a hold of you, in the end?”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”
Another small silence. Jackie said, again, “I’m so sorry, Francis.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“People’ll be looking for us.”
“I know. Give me one more minute and we’ll go back out.”
Jackie held out the can. I said, “Fuck that. I need something serious.” Under the windowsill was a loose floorboard where Shay and I used to hide our smokes from Kevin, and sure enough, Da had found it too. I flipped out a half-full naggin of vodka, took a swig and offered it to Jackie.
“Jaysus,” she said. She actually looked startled. “Why not, I suppose.” She took the bottle off me, had a ladylike sip and dabbed at her lipstick.
“Right,” I said. I took another good mouthful and stuck the bottle back in its little hidey-hole. “Now let’s go face the lynch mob.”
That was when the sounds from outside changed. The singing trailed off, fast; a second later the buzz of conversation died. A man snapped something low and angry, a chair clattered against a wall, and then Ma went off like something between a banshee and a car alarm.
Da and Matt Daly were squared off, chin to chin, in the middle of the sitting room. Ma’s lavender getup was splattered with something wet, all down the top, and she was still going (“I knew it, you bollix, I knew it, just the one evening, that’s all I asked you for…”). Everyone else had fallen back so as not to get in the way of the drama. I caught Shay’s eye across the room, with an instant click like magnets, and we started elbowing between the gawkers.
Matt Daly said, “Sit down.”
“Da,” I said, touching him on the shoulder.
He didn’t even know I was there. He told Matt Daly, “Don’t you give me orders in my own home.”
Shay, on his other side, said, “Da.”
“Sit down,” Matt Daly said again, low and cold. “You’re after causing a scene.”
Da lunged. The really useful skills never fade: I was on him just as fast as Shay was, my hands still knew the grip, and my back was all braced and ready when he stopped fighting and let his knees go limp. I was scarlet, right to my hairline, with pure scorching shame.
“Get him out of here,” Ma spat. A bunch of clucking women had clumped up around her and someone was swiping at her top with a tissue, but she was too furious to notice. “Go on, you, get out, get back to the gutter where you belong, I should’ve never pulled you out of it-your own son’s wake, you bastard, have you no respect-”
“Bitch!” Da roared over his shoulder, as we danced him neatly out the door. “Poxy hoor’s melt!”
“Out the back,” Shay said brusquely. “Let the Dalys go out the front.”
“Fuck Matt Daly,” Da told us, on our way down the stairs, “and fuck Tessie Daly. And fuck the pair of yous. Kevin was the only one of the three of yous that was worth a shite.”
Shay let out a harsh, bitten-off clip of a laugh. He looked dangerously exhausted. “You’re probably right there.”
“The best of the lot,” Da said. “My blue-eyed boy.” He started to cry.
“You wanted to know how he’s getting on?” Shay asked me. His eyes, meeting mine across the back of Da’s neck, looked like the flames on Bunsen burners. “Here’s your chance to find out. Enjoy.” He hooked the back door deftly open with one foot, dumped Da on the step, and headed back upstairs.
Da stayed where we had dropped him, sobbing luxuriously and throwing out the odd comment about the cruelty of life and enjoying himself no end. I leaned against the wall and lit a smoke. The dim orange glow coming from nowhere in particular gave the garden a spiky Tim Burton look. The shed where the toilet used to be was still there, missing a few boards now and leaning at an impossible angle. Behind me, the hall door slammed: the Dalys going home.
After a while Da’s attention span ran out, or his arse got cold. He dialed down the opera, wiped his nose on his sleeve and rearranged himself more comfortably on the step, wincing. “Give us a smoke.”
“Say please.”
“I’m your father and I said to give us a smoke.”
“What the hell,” I said, holding one out. “I’ll always give to a good cause. You getting lung cancer definitely qualifies.”
“You always were an arrogant little prick,” Da said, taking the smoke. “I should’ve kicked your ma down the stairs when she told me she was on the bubble.”
“And you probably did.”
“Bollix. I never laid a hand on any of yous unless you deserved it.”
He was too shaky to light up. I sat down next to him on the steps, took the lighter and did it for him. He stank of stale nicotine and stale Guinness, with a saucy little top-note of gin. All the nerves in my spine were still stone-cold petrified of him. The flow of conversation coming out the window above us was starting to pick up again, awkwardly, in patches.
I asked, “What’s wrong with your back?”
Da let out a huge lungful of smoke. “None of your business.”
“Just making small talk.”
“You were never into the small talk. I’m not thick. Don’t treat me like it.”
“I never thought you were,” I said, and meant it. If he had spent a little more time getting an education and a little less getting an alcohol habit, my da could have been a contender. When I was twelve or so, we did World War II in school. The teacher was a bitchy, closeted little bogger who felt that these inner-city kids were too stupid to understand anything that complex, so he didn’t bother trying. My da, who happened to be sober that week, was the one who sat down with me and drew pencil diagrams on the kitchen tablecloth and got out Kevin’s lead soldiers for armies and talked me through the whole thing, so clearly and so vividly that I still remember every detail like I saw the movie. One of my da’s tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life. He would have been a lot better off thick as a plank.
“What do you care about my back?”
“Curiosity. And if someone’s going to come after me for part of the cost of a nursing home, it’d be fun to know in advance.”
“I’ve asked you for nothing. And I’m not going into any nursing home. Shoot myself in the head first.”
“Good for you. Don’t leave it too late.”
“I wouldn’t give yous the satisfaction.”
He took another massive drag on the cigarette and watched the smoke ribbons curl out of his mouth. I asked, “What was that all about, upstairs?”
“This and that. Man’s business.”
“Which means what? Matt Daly rustled your cattle?”
“He shouldn’t have come in my house. Tonight of all nights.”
Wind nosed through the gardens, shouldered at the walls of the shed. For a split second I saw Kevin, just the night before, lying purple and white and battered in the dark, four gardens away. Instead of making me angry, it just made me feel like I weighed twenty stone; like I was going to have to sit there all night long, because my chances of ever being able to get up from that step by myself were nil.
After a while Da said, “D’you remember that thunderstorm? You’d’ve been, I don’t know, five, six. I brought you and your brother outside. Your ma had a fit.”
I said, “Yeah. I remember.” It had been the kind of pressure-cooker summer evening where no one can breathe and vicious fights erupt out of nowhere. When the first bang of thunder went off, Da let out a great laughing roar of relief. He scooped Shay up in one arm and me in the other and legged it down the stairs, with Ma yelping furiously behind us. He held us up to see the lightning flickering above the chimney pots and told us not to be scared of the thunder, because it was just the lightning heating up air as fast as an explosion, and not to be scared of Ma, who was leaning out the window getting shriller by the second. When a sheet of rain finally swept over us he threw his head back to the purple-gray sky and whirled us round and round in the empty street, Shay and me screaming with laughter like wild things, huge warm drops of rain splattering our faces and electricity crackling in our hair, thunder shaking the ground and rumbling up through Da’s bones into ours.