Faithful Place by Tana French
I said, “What did you tell him?”
“Francis . . . I’m sorry, right. I didn’t think—”
“What did you tell him, Imelda.”
“Just . . . you and Rosie. That yous were heading off.”
“When did you say it to him?”
“The Saturday night, in the pub. The night before yous were leaving. I thought, sure, what harm at that stage, it was too late for anyone to stop yous—”
Three girls leaning on the railings and tossing their hair, glossy and restless as wild fillies, fidgeting on the edge of their anything-can-happen evening. Apparently just about anything had. I said, “If you give me one more shitty excuse, I’m going to put my foot through that robbed telly.”
Imelda shut up. I said, “Did you tell him when we were going?”
A quick jerk of a nod.
“And where you’d left the suitcase?”
“Yeah. Not what room, like; just . . . in Number Sixteen.”
The dirty-white winter light through the lace curtains was vicious on her. Slumped in the corner of the sofa, in this overheated room that stank of grease and cigarettes and waste, she looked like an underfilled bag of bones wrapped in gray skin. I couldn’t think of one thing this woman could have wanted that would have been worth what she had thrown away. I said, “Why, Imelda? Why the hell?”
She shrugged. It dawned on me in a slow wave, with the faint red stain mottling her cheeks. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “You were into Shay?”
Another shrug, this one sharper and pricklier. Those bright-colored girls shrieking and play-fighting, Mandy said to ask if your brother fancies going to the pictures . . . I said, “I thought Mandy was the one who had a thing for him.”
“Her too. We all did—not Rosie, but loads of us. He had his pick.”
“And so you sold Rosie out to get his attention. Is that what you had in mind when you told me you loved her?”
“That’s not bleeding fair. I never meant to—”
I fired the ashtray at the telly. It was heavy and I put my whole body behind it; it smashed through the screen with an impressive crashing noise and an explosion of ash and butts and splinters of glass. Imelda let out something between a gasp and a yelp and cringed away from me, one forearm thrown up to protect her face. Specks of ash filled up the air, whirled and settled on the carpet, the coffee table, her tracksuit bottoms.
“Now,” I said. “What did I warn you?”
She shook her head, wild-eyed. She had a hand pressed over her mouth: someone had trained her not to scream.
I flicked away glittering speckles of glass and found Imelda’s smokes on the coffee table, under a ball of green ribbon. “You’re going to tell me what you said to him, word for word, as close as you can remember. Don’t leave anything out. If you can’t remember something for definite, say so; don’t make shit up. Is that clear?”
Imelda nodded, hard, into her palm. I lit a smoke and leaned back in the armchair. “Good,” I said. “So talk.”
I could have told the story myself. The pub was some place off Wexford Street, Imelda didn’t remember the name: “We were going dancing, me and Mandy and Julie, but Rosie had to be home early—her da was on the warpath—so she didn’t want to pay in to the disco. So we said we’d go for a few pints first . . .” Imelda had been up at the bar, getting her round in, when she spotted Shay. She had got chatting to him—I could see her, tossing her hair, jutting one hip, slagging him off. Shay had flirted back automatically, but he liked them prettier and softer and a lot less mouthy, and when his pints arrived he had gathered them up and turned to head back to his mates in their corner.
She had just been trying to keep his attention. What’s wrong, Shay? Is Francis right, yeah, are you more into the fellas?
Look who’s talking, he’d said. When was the last time that little prick had a girlfriend? And he had started to move off.
Imelda had said, That’s all you know.
That had stopped him. Yeah?
The lads are waiting on their pints. Go on, off you go.
I’ll be back in a sec. You just hang on there.
I might. Or I might not.
Of course she had waited for him. Rosie laughed at her when she dropped the drinks down to them in a rush, and Mandy faked an outraged sniff (Robbing my fella), but Imelda gave them the finger and hurried back up to the bar in time to be lounging there, all casual and sipping her glass of lager and one button undone, when Shay got back. Her heart was going ninety. He had never looked twice at her before.
He bent his head close and gave her the intense blue gaze that never let him down, slouched on a bar stool and slid one of his knees in between hers, bought her the next drink and ran a finger over her knuckles when he passed it to her. She spun the story out as long as she could, to keep him with her, but in the end the whole plan was spread out on the bar between them: the suitcase, the meeting place, the boat, the London bedsit, the music-business jobs, the tiny wedding; every secret thing Rosie and I had spent months building up, fragment by fragment, and keeping safe and precious next to our skin. Imelda felt like shite about doing it; she couldn’t even stand to look over at Rosie, cracking up laughing with Mandy and Julie over something or other. Twenty-two years later and the color still flamed up in her cheeks when she talked about it. She had done it anyway.
It was such a pathetic little story, a snip of nothing, the kind teenage girls fight over and forget every day. It had led us to this week and this room.
“Tell me,” I said. “Did he at least throw you a quick fuck, after all that?”
Imelda wasn’t looking at me, but the red patches deepened. “Oh, good. I’d hate to think you went to the hassle of selling me and Rosie down the river, all for nothing. This way, yeah, two people ended up dead and a big bunch of lives ended up getting blown to smithereens, but hey, at least you got the ride you were after.”
She said, in a thin stretched voice, “You mean . . . ? Me saying it to Shay. Did that get Rosie killed?”
“You’re a fucking genius.”
“Francis. Did . . . ?” Imelda shuddered all over, like a spooked horse. “Did Shay . . . ?”
“Did I say that?”
She shook her head.
“Well spotted. Pay attention, Imelda: if you go spreading that shite around, if you say it to even one person, you will regret it for the rest of your life. You’ve done your best to wreck one of my brothers’ name; I’m not having you wreck the other.”
“I’ll say nothing to anyone. I swear, Francis.”
“That includes your daughters. Just in case squealing runs in the family.” She flinched. “You never talked to Shay, and I was never here. Have you got me?”
“Yeah. Francis . . . I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry. I never once thought . . .”
I said, “Look what you did.” It was the only thing that would come out of my mouth. “Sweet Jesus, Imelda. Just look what you did.” And I left her there, staring at ash and broken glass and nothing.
19
That night lasted a long time. I almost rang my lovely lady friend from the Tech Bureau, but I figured few things can put a damper on a cheerful shag quite like a partner who knows too many details about how your ex died. I thought about going to the pub, but there was no point unless I was planning to get moldy drunk, which struck me as a truly lousy idea. I even thought, a lot, about ringing Olivia and asking if I could come over, but I figured I had probably pushed my luck far enough that week. I ended up at Ned Kelly’s on O’Connell Street, playing game after game of back-room pool with three Russian guys who didn’t speak much English but who could spot the international signs of a man in need. When Ned’s closed up, I went home and sat on my balcony, chain-smoking, till my arse started to freeze, at which point I went inside and watched delusional white boys make rapper hand signs at each other on some reality show until it got light enough that I could eat breakfast. Every few minutes I tried to hit that mental switch hard enough
It wasn’t Kev all grown up I kept seeing; it was the sticky-faced kid who had shared a mattress with me for so long that I could still feel his feet tucked between my shins to keep warm in winter. He had been the prettiest of us by a mile, a chubby blond angel off a cereal ad; Carmel and her mates used to haul him around like a rag doll, changing his clothes and shoving sweets in his mouth and practicing to be mammies someday. He would lie back in their dolly prams with a big happy grin on his face, lapping up the attention. Even at that age, our Kev had loved the ladies. I hoped someone had told his multiple girlfriends, and been gentle about it, why he wouldn’t be coming over any more.
And it wasn’t Rosie shining with first love and big plans who kept sliding into my mind; it was Rosie angry. An autumn evening when we were seventeen, Carmel and Shay and me smoking on the steps—Carmel smoked back then, and she let me bum off her during school terms, when I wasn’t working and couldn’t afford my own. The air smelled of peat smoke, mist and Guinness’s, and Shay was whistling “Take Me Up to Monto” softly to himself between his teeth. Then the shouting started.
It was Mr. Daly and he was going apeshit. The details got lost, but the gist of it was that he wouldn’t be crossed under his own roof and that someone was going to get the back of his hand in a minute if she wasn’t careful. My insides turned into one solid lump of ice.
Shay said, “A quid says he caught his missus riding some young fella.”
Carmel clicked her tongue. “Don’t be filthy.”
I said, keeping my voice casual, “You’re on.” We had been going out for a little over a year, me and Rosie. Our mates knew, but we played it down, to keep the word from spreading too far: just having a laugh, just messing, nothing serious. That felt more like bollix to me every week, but Rosie said her da wouldn’t be happy, and she said it like she meant it. Part of me had spent the last year waiting for this evening to kick me in the teeth.
“You haven’t got a quid.”
“Won’t need it.”
Windows were sliding open already—the Dalys fought less than just about anyone in the Place, so this was high-quality scandal. Rosie yelled, “You haven’t a bleeding clue!”
I got one last drag out of my smoke, down to the filter. “Quid,” I said to Shay.
“You’ll get it when I get paid.”
Rosie flung herself out of Number 3, slammed the door hard enough that the nosy biddies shot back into their lairs to enjoy being shocked in private, and headed our way. Against the gray autumn day, her hair looked like it was about to set the air on fire and blow the whole Place sky-high.
Shay said, “Howya, Rosie. Looking gorgeous as always.”
“And you’re looking like a bag of spanners, as always. Francis, can I have a word?”
Shay whistled; Carmel’s mouth was open. I said, “Yeah, sure,” and got up. “We’ll go for a walk, will we?” The last thing I heard behind me, as we turned the corner onto Smith’s Road, was Shay’s dirtiest laugh.
Rosie had her hands jammed deep in the pockets of her jeans jacket and she was walking so fast I could hardly keep up. She said, biting off the words, “My da found out.”
I had known that was coming, but my stomach hit my shoes anyway. “Ah, shite. I thought that, all right. How?”
“When we were in Neary’s. I should’ve known it wasn’t safe: my cousin Shirley and her mates drink there, and she’s a mouth on her the size of a church door. The little cow saw us. She told her ma, her ma told my ma, and my ma bleeding well told my da.”
“And he went ballistic.”
Rosie exploded. “The bastard, the bloody bastard, next time I see Shirley I’m going to splatter her—he didn’t listen to a word I said, might as well have been talking to the wall—”
“Rosie, slow down—”
“He said not to come crying to him when I wound up pregnant and dumped and covered in bruises, Jesus, Frank, I could’ve killed him, I swear to God—”
“Then what are you doing here? Does he know—?”
Rosie said, “Yeah, he does. He sent me round to break it off with you.”
I didn’t even realize I had stopped in the middle of the pavement till she turned back to see where I’d gone. “I’m not doing it, you big eejit! You seriously think I’d leave you ’cause my da told me to? Are you mental?”
“Christ,” I said. My heart slowly slid back down to where it belonged. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack? I thought . . . Christ.”
“Francis.” She came back to me and laced her fingers through mine, hard enough to hurt. “I’m not. OK? I just don’t know what to do.”
I would have sold a kidney to be able to come out with the magic answer. I went for the most impressive dragon-slaying offer I could think of. “I’ll call in and talk to your da. Man to man. I’ll tell him there’s no way I’d mess you around.”
“I already told him that. A hundred times. He thinks you’re after selling me a load of bollix so you can get into my knickers, and I’m after buying every word. You think he’ll listen to you, when he won’t to me?”
“So I’ll show him. Once he sees I’m treating you right—”
“We don’t have time! He says I’m to break it off with you tonight or he’ll throw me out of the house, and he will, he’ll do it. It’d break my mammy’s heart, but he wouldn’t care. He’ll tell her she can’t even see me again and, God help her, she’ll do what she’s told.”
After seventeen years of my family, my default solution to everything was a tightly zipped lip. I said, “So tell him you did it. Dumped me. Nobody has to know we’re still together.”
Rosie went motionless, and I saw her mind start to move fast. After a moment she said, “For how long?”
“Till we come up with a better plan, till your da chills out, I don’t know. If we just hang in there long enough, something’s bound to change.”
“Maybe.” She was still thinking hard, head bent over our joined hands. “D’you think we could pull it off ? The way people talk around here . . .”
I said, “I’m not saying it’d be easy. We’ll have to tell everyone we’re after breaking up, and make it sound good. We won’t be able to go to our debs together. You’ll be always worrying that your da’ll find out and throw you out.”
“I don’t give a damn. What about you, though? You don’t need to be sneaking around; your da isn’t trying to make you into a nun. Is it worth it?”
I said, “What are you on about? I love you.”
It stunned me. I had never said it before. I knew that I would never say it again, not really; that you only get one shot at it in a lifetime. I got mine out of nowhere on a misty autumn evening, under a street lamp shining yellow streaks on the wet pavement, with Rosie’s strong pliable fingers woven through mine.
Rosie’s mouth opened. She said, “Oh.” It came out on something like a wonderful, helpless, breathless laugh.
“There you go,” I said.
She said, “Well, then,” in another burst of almost-laughter. “Then it’s all OK, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“Yeah. I love you, too. So we’ll find a way. Am I right?”
I was out of words; I couldn’t think of anything to do except pull her tight against me. An old fella walking his dog dodged around us and muttered something about shocking carry-on, but I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. Rosie pressed her face hard into the angle of my neck; I felt her eyelashes flicker against my skin, and then wetness where they had been. “We will,” I said, into her warm hair, and I knew for certain it was true because we were holding the trump card, the wild joker that beat everything else in the pack. “We’ll find a way.”
We went home, once we had walked and talked ourselves exhausted, to start the careful, crucial process of convincing the Place we were history. Late that night, in spite of the long cunning wait we had planned, we met in Number 16. We were way beyond caring how dang
That evening was one of the reasons it had never occurred to me that Rosie could be dead. The blaze of her, when she was that angry: you could have lit a match by touching it to her skin, you could have lit up Christmas trees, you could have seen her from space. For all that to have vanished into nothing, gone for good, was unthinkable.
Danny Matches would burn down the bike shop and arrange all the evidence artistically to point straight to Shay, if I asked him nicely. Alternatively, I knew several guys who made Danny look like a cream puff and who would do a beautiful job, complete with whatever level of pain I required, of making sure none of Shay’s component parts were ever seen again.
The problem was that I didn’t want Danny Matches, or the bolt-gun brigade, or anyone else. Scorcher was right off the menu: if he needed Kevin for his bad guy that much, he could have him—Olivia was right, nothing anyone said could hurt Kev now, and justice had slid way down my Christmas wish list. All I wanted in the world was Shay. Every time I looked out over the Liffey I saw him at his window, somewhere in that tangle of lights, smoking and staring back across the river and waiting for me to come find him. I had never wanted any girl, not even Rosie, as badly as I wanted him.
Friday afternoon I texted Stephen: Same time, same place. It was raining, thick sleety rain that soaked through everything you were wearing and chilled you down to the bone; Cosmo’s was packed with wet tired people counting shopping bags and hoping if they stayed put long enough they would get warm. This time I only ordered coffee. I already knew this wasn’t going to take long.
Stephen looked a little unsure about what we were doing there, but he was too polite to ask. Instead he said, “Kevin’s phone records haven’t come in yet.”
“I didn’t think they had. Do you know when the investigation’s winding up?”