Faithful Place by Tana French
The back door of Number 16 was swinging open on blackness, creaking restlessly when the wind caught it. I stood in the doorway, watching the dim snow-blue light filtering down the stairs and my breath drifting on the frozen air. If I had believed in ghosts, that house would have been the let-down of a lifetime: it should have been thick with them, soaking the walls, cramming the air, keening and flittering in every high corner, but I had never seen anywhere that empty, empty enough to suck the breath out of you. Whatever I had come looking for—Scorcher, bless his predictable little heart, would presumably have suggested closure or some equivalent chunk of arsebiscuit—it wasn’t there. A sprinkle of snowflakes swirled in over my shoulder, lay for a second on the floorboards and were gone.
I thought about taking something away with me or leaving something behind, just for the sake of it, but I had nothing worth leaving and there was nothing I wanted to take. I found an empty crisp packet in the weeds, folded it and used it to jam the door shut. Then I went back over the wall and started walking again.
I was sixteen, in that top room, when I first touched Rosie Daly. It was a Friday evening in summer: a gang of us, a couple of big bottles of cheap cider, twenty SuperKing Lights and a pack of strawberry bonbons—we were that young. We had been picking up days on the building sites on our school holidays, me and Zippy Hearne and Des Nolan and Ger Brophy, so we were brown and muscly and in the money, laughing louder and wider, thrumming with all that brand-new manhood and telling amped-up work stories to impress the girls. The girls were Mandy Cullen and Imelda Tierney and Des’s sister Julie, and Rosie.
For months she had slowly been turning into my own secret magnetic north. At nights I lay in bed and was sure I felt her, through the brick walls and across the cobblestones, drawing me towards her down the long tides of her dreams. Being this close to her pulled at me so hard I could barely breathe—we were all sitting against the walls, and my legs were stretched out so near Rosie’s that if I had moved just a few inches, my calf would have been pressed to hers. I didn’t need to look at her; I could feel every move she made right inside my skin, I knew when she pushed her hair behind her ear or shifted her back against the wall to get the sun on her face. When I did look, she made my head stop working.
Ger was sprawled on the floor, giving the girls a dramatic based-on-a-true-story account of how he had single-handedly caught an iron girder that had been about to plummet three stories onto someone’s head. All of us were half giddy, on the cider and the nicotine and the company. We had known each other since we were in diapers, but that was the summer when things were changing, faster than we could keep up. Julie had a stripe of blusher down each plump cheek, Rosie had on a new silver pendant that flashed in the sun, Zippy’s voice had finally finished breaking, and all of us were wearing body spray.
“—And then your man says to me, ‘Son,’ he says, ‘if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be walking out of here on my own two feet today—’”
“D’you know what I smell?” Imelda asked no one in particular. “Bollix. Lovely fresh bollix.”
“And you’d recognize those,” Zippy said, grinning at her.
“Dream on. If I ever recognized yours, I’d top meself.”
“It’s not bollix,” I told her. “I was standing right there, saw the whole thing. I’m telling yous, girls, this fella’s a real-life hero.”
“Hero, me arse,” Julie said, nudging Mandy. “The state of him. He wouldn’t have the strength to catch a football, never mind a girder.”
Ger flexed a bicep. “Come over here and say that, you.”
“Not bad,” Imelda said, lifting an eyebrow and tapping ash into an empty can. “Now show us your pecs.”
Mandy squealed. “You dirtbird, you!”
“You’re the dirtbird,” Rosie said. “Pecs is just his chest. What’d you think it was?”
“Where’d you learn words like that?” Des demanded. “I never heard of these pec yokes before.”
“The nuns,” Rosie told him. “They showed us pictures and all. In biology, you know?”
For a second Des looked gobsmacked; then he copped on and threw a bonbon at Rosie. She caught it neatly, tossed it into her mouth and laughed at him. I thought about punching him, but I couldn’t come up with a good excuse.
Imelda gave Ger a little cat grin. “So are we seeing them or not?”
“D’you dare me?”
“I do, yeah. Go on.”
Ger winked at us. Then he stood up, wiggled his eyebrows at the girls and inched his T-shirt coyly up his belly. All of us whooped; the girls started giving him the slow clap. He peeled off the T-shirt, whirled it around his head, tossed it at them and struck a muscle-man pose.
The girls were laughing too hard to keep clapping. They were collapsed together in the corner, heads on each other’s shoulders, holding their stomachs. Imelda was wiping away tears. “You sexy beast, you—”
“Ah, God, I think I’m after rupturing myself—” from Rosie.
“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
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.
Author’s Note
Faithful Place did exist once, but it was on the other side of the River Liffey—northside, in the warren of streets that made up the red-light district of Monto, rather than southside in the Liberties—and it was gone long before the events of this book. Every corner of the Liberties is layered with centuries of its own history, and I didn’t want to belittle any of that by pushing an actual street’s stories and inhabitants aside to make way for my fictional story and characters. So, instead, I’ve played fast and loose with Dublin geography: resurrected Faithful Place, moved it across the river, and added this book into the decades when the street doesn’t have a history of its own to be pushed aside.
As always, any inaccuracies, deliberate or otherwise, are mine.
Acknowledgments
I owe enormous thank-yous to the usual suspects, and then some: the amazing Darley Anderson and his team, especially Zoë, Maddie, Kasia, Rosanna and Caroline, for being several million miles beyond what any author could expect from an agency; Kendra Harpster at Viking, Ciara Considine at Hachette Books Ireland and Sue Fletcher at Hodder & Stoughton, three editors who regularly take my breath away with their passion, skill, and immense soundness; Clare Ferraro, Ben Petrone, Kate Lloyd and everyone at Viking; Breda Purdue, Ruth Shern, Ciara Doorley, Peter McNulty and everyone at Hachette Books Ireland; Swati Gamble, Katie Davison and everyone at Hodder & Stoughton; Rachel Burd, for another razor-sharp copy-edit; Pete St. John, for his beautiful love songs to Dublin and for his generosity in allowing me to quote from them; Adrienne Murphy, for remembering McGonagle’s even through the haze; Dr. Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for the medical bits; David Walsh, for answering questions about police procedure and sharing insights into a detective’s world; Louise Lowe, for coming up with such a great title (and cast) for that play, all those years ago; Ann-Marie Hardiman, Oonagh Montague, Catherine Farrell, Dee Roycroft, Vincenzo Latronico, Mary Kelly, Helena Burling, Stewart Roche, Cheryl Steckel and Fidelma Keogh, for various invaluable kinds of warmth and love and support; David Ryan, braccae tuae aperiuntur; my brother and sister-in-law, Alex French and Susan Collins, and my parents, Elena Hvostoff-Lombardi and David French, for more reasons than I have room to list; and, as alway
Tana French, Faithful Place