Theo guessed the tone of this last sentence was meant to be sinister but Michael’s nasal whine couldn’t really do sinister. More Daniel O’Donnell than Marlon Brando. The thought amused him. Michael didn’t like that.
“Will I take Ronan Patterson?”
Theo threw the question in quickly, without really thinking. He had seen the gleam of umbrage in Michael’s eyes and he didn’t fancy a row. Precious was in the pub down the street, waiting and getting fiercer by the second, and Theo was all too aware of the fine line between a make-up ride and no sex at all. Ronan might be useful in any case and he was part of the Gerrity crew already. The only other dealer Theo knew, in fact. Michael didn’t sell any more. He was more like a manager. That was the way things were now: the big guys liked to keep the small lads on their toes, not really knowing where they fit in the grand scheme of things. Ignorance is bliss. And potentially a shorter jail term. He wasn’t sure why Gerrity had wanted to meet him out of all the others. Maybe because he was a foreigner, he wanted to check him out himself. Boss men could be curious too.
Michael frowned, diverted from falling into a sulk.
“Yeah, why not? Not the brightest but he’ll do. Tell him it’s an important job though. Don’t want him messing it up.”
Theo let the irony light up his mind with fluorescent laughter waves. He’d ask Cara to come too, he thought. She looked like she could do with a last night on the lash before the exams, and it’d back up his story that he was just friends with Ronan. Maybe he’d ask Jason and Siobhán. He was sure Jason’s friends would be up for chemical enhancements. They could all go together after the restaurant closed – it’d help break him into the new job too. Precious might fancy it, although she didn’t mind him going out now and then with other mates and she wasn’t that fond of Jarvis Street.
Shit, Precious.
“Listen, man I’ve gotta go. Herself is waiting for me.” Theo spread his hands, layering the ‘sorry’ tone on thick, knowing it would appeal to Michael’s big man psychosis.
“Alright so, she’s got you where she wants you, that’s for sure. I’ll be off. Gimme a shout and let me know how it goes. You can drop the money to us at the usual place on Monday, and I’ll have more for you then if ye’ve moved it all. Come round bout midday.”
Theo nodded. He followed Michael to the door.
“Gerrity’s in town just now, ye know,” Michael said as he passed into the hall. “So watch your backs. The cops’ll be on the lookout to pin stuff on him so no screw-ups. And pass that on to your mate Neville too. I’m hearing he’s getting careless, his take is down, and if he doesn’t pull his socks up, I’m gonna have to take action. We don’t want an Apache on the crew. Tell him I said so.”
Theo nodded vaguely, did the obligatory fist bump and gratefully shut the door. Only then did he let his shoulders sag. Neville? What the fuck was he doing working with Gerrity’s crew? He hadn’t mentioned a thing. Theo’d thought he was still just selling part of his own stash of weed and coke around the campus, small-time stuff. This was no world for Neville. Everyone knew a dealer-client was a liability. Always but especially when it came to Neville, Theo thought.
For some reason, the world was never enough for Theo’s friend. Not shiny enough, not real enough, not big enough. He needed his highs and his new lands, just like it said on the tin. Name the man, make the man, Theo thought, remembering what Neville had said when he asked him where his name came from. “Apparently it’s French. Means new town,” Neville said, shrugging his shoulders. “No idea why they called me that. Probably had notions,” he laughed.
Neville was also soft. He’d lend a fiver to a stranger, no questions. Not for the first time, Theo wondered if Neville was deliberately trying to spin himself out of orbit and into freefall.
CHAPTER FOUR
These days, the news would make you cry, thought Deirdre as she sipped her rum and coke. Spending cuts, unemployment up again, expenses scandals, priests up to all sorts. The trouble was the misery was becoming boring. This meltdown was so long in the making that even the presenters and reporters looked bored. Ireland was bored. Nobody ever wants to talk about the cleanup after a party.
Still, it was nice to be on the sofa on her own, feet tucked in beneath her, glass in hand.
The presenter was now talking about the World Cup in South Africa. It was starting next week and Deirdre wondered fleetingly if she should call Kevin who was upstairs somewhere, but in the end, she couldn’t be bothered to move and she was also reluctant to give up this rare moment of peace. Grace must be studying. She was up in her room anyway, door closed as usual.
When Deirdre went up earlier, she didn’t dare even look in. Instead, she’d listened, head cocked, thinking what an eejit she was to be too afraid to go into her own daughter’s room. A fine state of affairs for a grown woman, skulking around her own house. These days, she spent hours preparing sentences in her head before speaking, terrified of waking the stressed teenage beast through a misplaced word, pause or implied question. Jesus, it was exhausting. Grace was a lovely girl, really. It was just that she seemed to be constantly at war with her mam. It wasn’t just the eye-rolling and door-slamming that the parenting magazines talked about. Grace’s anger seemed to be fuelled by Deirdre’s very person, the actual fact of her, something that kicked in even before she opened her mouth. Still, could she blame her with everything that was going on? She’d ask Pauline for advice but she only had the one lad, and God knows, she had enough trouble of her own with Michael.
The Leaving was making things ten times worse, of course. The final exam couldn’t come soon enough for Deirdre. She’d never say it, because despite all the mess with Fergal she’d quite like to live into her fifties, but Grace had put her head down too late. She barely did any work until a couple of weeks ago and then she’d met your man with the posh name at some library in the city and since then she’d been hanging out with him all hours of the day and night. Deirdre took another sip.
“I’ll turn into an alkie myself at this rate,” she muttered. “And one in the house is enough.”
It felt good to say it out loud, even if it was just a whisper to an empty room.
She should call her dad. He’d have watched the news and would probably be thinking about getting ready for bed now. She preferred to ring him around this time. There was always something to whinge about on the news so that gave them something to talk about without having to say anything. She couldn’t be doing with the kind of awkward pauses that left too much time to think.
Her father had never been much of a talker. He wasn’t around much when they were young anyway, always off driving his loads around the country, and then, after her mam died when she was twelve, he was moody and abrupt, treating her and her brother Cian like nuisances. They were all marked by that terrible absence, the unexpectedness of it. They hadn’t realised that a clock deep inside their mother’s body was speeding up, ticking out the days faster than anyone could’ve imagined. How could they have thought she would die at forty-five? There was no imagining such a thing, even as a child when everything was imaginable.
Cian didn’t have anything to do with their dad now. He’d put as much distance as he could between them by settling in Melbourne five years ago and he’d never visited since. She missed Cian and her mam. All she had left now was her dad, still stuck in that house out by the Atlantic where she grew up, rushing through the years so she could get the hell out.
She picked up the phone and dialled his number. At least it would take her mind off the time. Fergal should’ve been here by now. That meant he was in the pub. She felt her stomach twist and for a moment, her brain froze, too scared to think beyond the fact that her husband was out on the lash. Her fingers went automatically to the bruise around her eye. She patted it gingerly, soft touches like you were supposed to use when applying those eye creams she could never afford. There was no bloody cream for this though. She took a breath. It would be okay tonight, surely?
&n
bsp; “Hello, Dad.”
“Ah Deirdre, it’s yourself?”
She wondered who else he thought it might be.
“How are you?” he said.
“Good, good. Getting ourselves ready here for Grace’s Leaving and Conor’s Junior Cert. It’s all kicking off next week. It’s a quiet house these days. They’ve got their heads down at last.”
“’Bout time, I suppose.”
There was a pause. They were still not good at this.
“How’s Fergal?” he said.
“Okay, he’s not in right now but work seems fine. No talk of any redundancies yet anyway. Mind you, looking at the news tonight, you’d not hold out much hope of things getting better. Did you see the protests up at the Dáil the other day, against the cuts? There was an old lady there looked just like Mrs McClusky up the road from you. D’you think she made the trip up to raise a racket?”
Her dad laughed, a thin, skeletal sound. Still, it made her smile. Ever the child trying to make Daddy happy. Her dad, as she knew he would, launched into an expletive-laden rant against ‘those bastards in the Dáil’, and as he railed, she tried to remember if he’d laughed more when her mother was around. Maybe. He must’ve but so few of her memories of him had survived the cataclysm of her mother dying. She had a picture in her head of her dad sitting behind a table laden with pint glasses, head tilted back, mouth wide. But she couldn’t remember the context and how would she have seen him in a pub? They weren’t at all that kind of family. Must be an old photograph she had come across – maybe when she was clearing out her mam’s things after the cancer took her? But without the context, it was hard to give the memory credence. And wasn’t Grace blathering on the other day about some article she’d read that said each time you recalled a memory, you actually distorted it, just by thinking of it. Grace had said it was like changing the shape of a coat a tiny bit every time you put it on. Because getting older wasn’t depressing enough without knowing you were losing your past just by thinking of it, Deirdre thought grimly.
Still, she didn’t want to dismiss the pub image, false or not, out-of-hand. She didn’t want all her memories to be dark ones. She’d need balance one day. She’d need to be able to remember a flesh-and-blood man when she buried her father. Not just a morose, angry figurehead with, as they said admiringly back in the day, links to the Provos.
He had segued into his favourite subject now – ‘the bloodsucking bankers’.
“Cheats and traitors, the lot of them. They sucked this country dry, buying themselves yachts and villas and fancy cars. And they’re still swanning around in their millionaire mansions while we’re stuck here in this god forsaken drenched hole with nothing to show for all those years of plenty. They should all be lined up and shot. There was a time, I’m telling ye, when we would’ve put a bullet in their heads, no question.”
Deirdre wondered if he still had a gun, if indeed he’d ever had one. She assumed if he had, he’d kept it, probably hidden somewhere in the shed where he kept the bales of hay for the three or four cows he had in his fields. They were not his cows. The few fields he had now he leased out to local lads looking for a bit more grass for their animals in that desolate land of stones. Despite being born in the area, like his father and father before as he was fond of saying, he was not a son of the land. He’d driven trucks, carrying chocolates, canned food, appliances, beer and the occasional gun, it was said, up and down Ireland and across the border for years. She didn’t know much about his time with the IRA. She didn’t think he did much other than ferry stuff around but you never know. He definitely had the coldness in him to use a gun. She’d probably never know for sure. That time might well be past, and many of the players might be dead, but the fanatical Irish version of omerta was still in force. Sure, they hadn’t even found all the bodies yet and those who knew, like her dad maybe, were not telling. It was a heartless thing to keep a body from its loved ones, Deirdre thought. It was the kind of thing she could well imagine her dad doing, God forgive her.
She tuned back in. He’d asked a question.
“How’s that job of yours going?”
“Sure, it’s grand. I go in, I get on with it, I don’t do many weekends and we’re all happy with that,” she said.
“I wish you’d give it up,” he grumbled, his voice taut and low like a cat ready to pounce.
If there was one thing Deirdre Walsh née Flaherty had learnt over the years, it was how to read voices. It was her top survival skill, she would joke to Pauline when they’d had a few. Gauging someone’s mood by the tone of their first word could get you a crucial couple of seconds, enough time to get to the bathroom and bolt the door. She would laugh as she said this and Pauline would laugh with her, and sure it’d be laughs galore until the next time she really had to do it. And it was no laughing matter then.
“I’d wager you’re only earning peanuts, and it’s… it’s dirty work. Not for you,” her dad was saying.
“I don’t mind it, Dad. It gets me out of the house, I get a few pounds so I don’t always have to be asking Fergal for money for myself or the kids and it’s not like there are millions of options for women my age right now. It’ll get me through the summer and then, I promise, I’ll look for something else. There might be some nursing jobs then, you never know. Things have to pick up at some stage. Surely they can’t break anything else and there can’t be anyone left to steal from, so I guess the TDs and the bankers and the tycoons will have to start putting it all back together again. They’ll want new toys to play with and they’ve smashed their old ones, so they’ll have to build some more.”
“But sure, doesn’t Fergal make enough for ye all? And if he doesn’t, he bloody well should. Anyways, where’s he tonight? Out drinking again, I suppose.”
“No, no. He had to go see a supplier in Kildare.” Deirdre lied smoothly.
Another survival skill. Her dad had never liked Fergal much anyway. There was no way she was telling him the truth now.
“Anyway, like I said, I’m only going to be in the restaurant for a few months. I want to get Grace something really nice after the exams. I was thinking I might even buy her a ticket to go over to England. And then Conor will need a present too after the Junior Cert. Every little helps, as they say.”
“I suppose, you’ve got a point,” he grunted.
Deirdre smiled into the phone. Her dad might believe washing dishes was below his daughter – and the thought made the child in her feel warm again – but he couldn’t argue with her financial logic. And at least she’d gotten him off the subject of Fergal. If he knew her husband beat her, he’d very likely kill him, old man or no old man. She’d always bet on her dad versus her husband. Fergal might be handy with his fists but he was a child compared to Séamus Flaherty.
After she ended the call, she topped up her glass, put the rum bottle back in the press under the telly and tried to relax back into the sofa. There was a Will Smith film on and she loved the lazy ease of the man but the moment for mindless watching was gone. She put her feet back into her slippers. She got a coaster for her glass and made sure the curtains were closed properly, even though it was still light out. She ran to the front door to make sure her keys were not in the lock on the outside. She’d been doing that a lot lately and it made Fergal lose the block altogether. She poked her head around the kitchen door to give the small room a once over. One of the kids had made a sandwich, it seemed. When was that? She hadn’t heard them. She put the dirty knife in the sink and cleaned the crumbs off the counter. She switched off the light. Then put it on again. He’d probably want some light when he came in but the bulb in the hall was very bright and he’d see that from the van and be mad at the waste before he even entered the house. The kitchen light would have to be the Christmas candle tonight, guiding the weary to shelter. If only there was no room at this inn.
She settled again on the sofa, but this time like a teenager at a job interview, arse clenched, leaning forward. She looked at her watch. Alre
ady gone 10. She should check if the boys were at least getting ready for bed. Upstairs, Grace’s door was still closed but she could hear music inside. She said it helped her study but Deirdre couldn’t see how. They did say today’s kids were better at multi-tasking because of all the technology. But then there were the experts who said their attention spans were shrinking. Maybe they were two sides of the same coin. She should Google the whole music/homework thing, she thought.
Kevin was in his pyjamas already, brushing his teeth in the bathroom.
“Good lad,” she said, wrapping her arms around him from behind and holding him fast. He nodded, his mouth full of frothy toothpaste.
“We’ll do something nice tomorrow, maybe go for a walk by the sea?” she said. “The other two will be studying, so it’ll just be us. Would you like that?”
“Yeah, Mam. Can we skim stones?” He spoke widemouthed, trying to keep the toothpaste in. Then he spat.
“Yeah, why not?” she laughed.
“And have ice-cream? And a slushie?” His voice had gone small, beseeching.
“Now you’re pushing your luck, you cheeky so-and-so. Get off to bed with you. We’ll see about the rest tomorrow.”
For the briefest of moments, Kevin snuggled into her chest, turning his face up for a kiss. She held him tight. Her last little baby. She was probably six months out from a total ban on this kind of sloppiness. She knew better than to hug him in the street nowadays, or touch him at all actually since he gave out to her about ruffling his hair at the school gate last month, but at ten, Kevin still allowed her to cuddle him at home. She breathed in his smell, deeply, deliberately like she was choosing a bouquet at a flower shop. One day, this would be a memory, this feeling of holding the world in her arms. Her heart gave a little jolt. Pleasure and pain; it all got so mixed up as they got older. The ache of letting your kids go was like a series of small deadly shocks, a years-long, slow-mo earthquake. She wouldn’t shy from the reality, she would face it head on because maybe then she would be ready, maybe by taking it on the chin every day, it would hurt less when they did leave her. But deep down she knew it was a hopeless strategy. Nothing would lessen the pain that was coming. It was not either/or but and. It was always the way.
Rain Falls on Everyone Page 5