Shay let out a snort, which got him matching glares from the girls. “Hang on till I think a minute,” Jackie said. “It was just an evening, you know what I mean? Nothing special. Am I right, Carmel?”
The two of them gazed at each other, thinking hard. Carmel blew her nose. She said, “I thought Kevin was a bit out of sorts. Did yous not?”
Shay shook his head in disgust and turned his shoulder to them, distancing himself from the whole thing. Jackie said, “He looked grand to me. Himself and Gav were out here playing football with the kids.”
“But he was smoking. After the dinner. Kevin doesn’t smoke unless he’s up to ninety, so he doesn’t.”
And there we were. Privacy for tête-à-têtes was in short supply around Ma’s (Kevin Mackey, what are the two of yous whispering about there, if it’s that interesting then we all want to hear it…). If Kevin had needed a word with Shay-and the poor thick bastard would have gone chasing after exactly that, once I blew him off; nothing more cunning would ever have entered his head-he would have followed him out to the steps for a smoke.
Kev would have made a bollix of it, messing about with his cigarette, fumbling and stammering over bringing out the jagged bits and pieces that were slicing into his mind. All that awkwardness would have given Shay plenty of time to recover and laugh out loud: Holy Jaysus, man, are you seriously after convincing yourself I killed Rosie Daly? You’ve it all arseways. If you want to know what really happened… Quick glance up at the window, stubbing out a smoke on the steps. Not now, but; no time. Will we meet up later, yeah? Come back, after you leave. You can’t call round to my gaff or Ma’ll want to know what we’re at, and the pubs’ll be closed by then, but I’ll meet you in Number Sixteen. It won’t take long, sure.
It was what I would have done, in Shay’s place, and it would have been almost that easy. Kevin wouldn’t have been happy about the idea of going back into Number 16, especially in the dark, but Shay was a lot smarter than he was and an awful lot more desperate, and Kevin had always been easy to bulldoze. It would never have occurred to him to be afraid of his own brother; not that kind of afraid. For someone who had grown up in our family, Kev had been so innocent it made my jaw ache.
Jackie said, “Honest to God, Francis, nothing happened. It was just like today. They all had a game of football, and then we had the dinner and watched a bit of telly… Kevin was grand. You can’t be blaming yourself.”
I asked, “Did he make any phone calls? Get any phone calls?”
Shay’s eyes flicked to me for a second, narrow and assessing, but he kept his mouth shut. Carmel said, “He was texting back and forth with some girl-Aisling, was it? I was telling him not to be leading her on, but he said I hadn’t a clue, that’s not how things work nowadays… He was awful snotty with me, so he was. That’s what I mean about out of sorts. The last time I saw him, and…” Her voice had a subdued, bruised note to it. Any minute she was going to start crying again.
“No one else?”
The girls both shook their heads. I said, “Hmm.”
Jackie asked, “Why, Francis? What difference does it make?”
“Kojak’s on the trail,” Shay said, to the lilac sky. “Who loves ya, baby?”
I said, “Put it like this. I’ve heard a whole bunch of different explanations for what happened to Rosie and what happened to Kevin. I don’t like a single one of them.”
Jackie said, “No one does, sure.”
Carmel popped paint blisters on the railing with one fingernail. She said, “Accidents happen. Sometimes things just go terrible wrong; there’s no rhyme nor reason to it. You know?”
“No, Melly, I don’t know. To me that looks exactly like all the other explanations people have tried to shove down my throat: a great big stinking lump of shite that’s nowhere near good enough for either Rosie or Kevin. And I’m in no humor to swallow it.”
Carmel said, with certainty weighing down her voice like a rock, “There’s nothing that’ll make this better, Francis. We’re all of us heartbroken, and there’s no explanation in the world that’ll fix that. Would you not leave it?”
“I might, except that plenty of other people won’t, and one of the top theories has me down as the big bad villain. You think I should just ignore that? You’re the one said you wanted me to keep coming here. Have a think about what that means. You want me to spend every Sunday on a street that thinks I’m a killer?”
Jackie moved on the step. She said, “I already told you. That’s just talk. It’ll blow over.”
I said, “Then, if I’m not the bad guy and Kev’s not the bad guy, yous tell me. What happened?”
The silence went on for a long time. We heard them coming before we saw them: kids’ voices twisting together, a quick hushed running murmur, somewhere inside the dazzle of long evening light at the top of the road. They stepped out of that dazzle in a tangle of black silhouettes, the men tall as lampposts, the kids blurring and flickering in and out of each other. Holly’s voice called, “Daddy!” and I raised an arm to wave, even though I couldn’t make out which one she was. Their shadows leaped down the road in front of them and threw mysterious shapes at our feet.
“Now,” Carmel said softly, to herself. She took a breath and ran her fingers under her eyes, making sure nothing was left of her cry. “Now.”
I said, “Next time we get a chance, you’ll have to finish telling me what happened last Sunday.”
Shay said, “And then it got late, Ma and Da and me headed for bed, and Kev and Jackie headed for home.” He threw his cigarette over the railings and stood up. “The end,” he said.
As soon as we all got back into the flat Ma kicked things up a gear, to punish us for leaving her to her own terrifying devices. She was doing ferocious things to vegetables and issuing orders at warp speed: “You, Carmel-Jackie-Carmel-whoever-you-are, get them potatoes started-Shay, put that over there, no, you simpleton, there-Ashley, love, give the table a wipe for your nana-and Francis, you go in and have a word with your da, he’s after getting back into the bed and he wants a bit of company. Go on!” She smacked me across the head with a dish towel, to get me moving.
Holly had been leaning against my side, showing me some painted ceramic thing she had bought in the Christmas Village to give Olivia and explaining in detail how she had met Santa’s elves, but at that she melted neatly away among the cousins, which I felt showed good sense. I considered doing the same thing, but Ma has the ability to keep nagging for so long that it borders on a superpower, and the dishcloth was aimed in my direction again. I got out of her way.
The bedroom was colder than the rest of the flat, and quiet. Da was in bed, propped up on pillows and apparently doing nothing at all except, maybe, listening to the voices coming from the other rooms. The fussy softness all round him-peach decor, fringed things, muted glow from a standing lamp-made him look bizarrely out of place and somehow stronger, more savage. You could see why girls had fought over him: the tilt of his jaw, the arrogant jut of his cheekbones, the restless blue spark in his eyes. For a moment, in that untrustworthy light, he looked like wild Jimmy Mackey still.
His hands were what gave him away. They were a mess-fingers swollen huge and curled inwards, nails white and rough like they were already decaying-and they never stopped moving on the bed, plucking fretfully at loose threads in the duvet. The room stank of sickness and medicine and feet.
I said, “Ma said you fancied a chat.”
Da said, “Give us a smoke.”
He still seemed sober, but then my da has poured a lifetime of dedication into building up his tolerance, and it takes a lot to put a visible dent in it. I swung the chair from Ma’s dressing table over to the bed, not too close. “I thought Ma didn’t let you smoke in here.”