The words came in a rush.
“How badly is he hurt, Theo?” Deirdre dropped her voice. Theo sounded like he was in shock. She’d seen it before when she worked in A&E. She’d have to keep him calm, ignore the blood rushing in her ears.
There was a pause. She could hear a muffled siren behind him and then a clattering, like something falling from a vending machine.
“They wrecked his hand, Deirdre. Hammered a nail into his palm. He’s got fag burns on his face and he’s been bashed up pretty bad around the head too. Thank Christ, he’s out cold now. They gave him massive painkillers and they’ve strapped his hand up but he looks bad.”
“Have you told his parents? You’ll have to call them, Theo.”
“I know. I’m gonna do that now.”
Deirdre saw a movement in the kitchen. Grace was home. She was standing at the table, putting her flowered rucksack down and frowning at her phone. She suddenly clocked Deirdre and smiled. You poor girl, Deirdre thought.
“I’ll tell Grace now. She’ll want to come down to him and I won’t be able to stop her. I can’t leave because Fergal is asleep upstairs and Kevin’ll be home any minute, so can you meet her there, Theo? Did you take him to the Mater?”
“Yeah, we’re in A&E. I’ll wait here until she comes. She can text me when she gets here. Don’t tell her too much, Deirdre. No need for her to know every little detail. It’ll be obvious soon enough and I’ve a feeling Nev won’t want her to know everything. It should probably come from him anyway.”
“Okay, I’ve gotta go. She’s just come in from work.”
“Deirdre?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks, for Gerrity’s number. If they didn’t know I was coming, I dunno if they would’ve stopped. I mean, they probably weren’t going to kill him but I dunno.”
Even though she knew well what Gerrity was, Deirdre realised she was shaking. She looked again at Grace who was coming to the back door. She wanted to run to her and bubble-wrap herself around her so that she couldn’t get hurt by anything ever again. How could she have let Gerrity’s sick world crash into her own? She’d taken her eye off the ball, or like every parent ever, she thought the ball game was only for other people.
“Did Gerrity do this himself, d’you think?” she asked. For some reason, she needed to know.
“Not himself,” Theo said. “Nah, he wouldn’t get his hands dirty like that. His lads did it. I saw one, but…”
“Theo, you still there? I think you cut out.”
The pause extended so that Deirdre could hear the swallows’ electrical chirping above her head.
“Theo?”
“I’m still here. Sorry Deirdre, gotta go.”
He sounded different now, wary. Maybe there was someone listening?
“Tell Grace to text me from reception and I’ll come and get her.”
He hung up.
When Deirdre turned around, Grace was standing on the paving stones.
“C’mere, love. I’ve to tell you something.”
“You alright, Mam? Why’re ye out here?”
“I didn’t want to wake your Dad. He’s gone to bed. Listen, love, I’ve some bad news. Neville’s… well, he’s had an accident. It’s alright, he’s grand, but he’s in the Mater. Theo’s with him.”
For a moment, Grace just stood there, her forehead creased, like she hadn’t quite understood. And she hadn’t yet because in her world, at her age, accidents were just that, bumps in a road that looked so long no one could ever imagine its end.
“What happened? I’ve been texting him since this morning and calling but there was no answer. I thought he was just… well, sometimes he can go quiet for a few hours, even a day or two. What kind of accident?”
Looking at her daughter standing before her, all rounded eyes like the toddler she was just a heartbeat ago, Deirdre felt like a child herself. She desperately wanted her own mother. She would know what to do, what to say. I’m still only learning, she thought. And no one ever taught me this.
“I think he was beaten up. His hand is… pretty messed up.”
“Why? Who would do that? Sure, Neville never hurt a fly, Mam.”
Deirdre just shook her head. Grace had to learn this lesson herself: sometimes there were just no reasons and sometimes the reasons didn’t matter at all.
Grace started crying. Deirdre hugged her tight and for once, her statuesque woman-daughter didn’t resist. She didn’t ask any more questions either and so Deirdre knew she had some idea of what Neville was up to, some idea of who might’ve done this. But time enough to talk about that later. You always needed more time.
“But he has beautiful hands, Mam. Really lovely hands,” Grace sobbed into her mother’s shoulder.
They stood there, locked together as excited shouts and angry jeers came to them on the wind from the football game. Looking up beyond her daughter’s bowed head, Deirdre saw a pale moon rising, like it couldn’t care less.
Neville was released three days later. He went home to his parents and Deirdre could only imagine that conversation. Grace went round to see him a couple of times. They let her up to his room but she said they gave her the dirty eye. They probably thought she was part of the dark world that Neville had – in their minds at least – innocently blundered into. Grace didn’t press Neville on what he’d told them. In fact, they didn’t really talk about what had happened at all, at least not about the whys and hows. He told her what the doctors had said but he talked about his injuries as though they had surged up out of nowhere. Like a disease that just chose him instead of all the other lads. When Grace came down from his room, Neville’s mother, a thin woman with dark hair, greying at the roots and sides, and eyes deep in her skull, asked her: “Do you know who did this?”
Grace mumbled no. The mother didn’t take her eyes off hers.
“It’s just we realise we know so little about what exactly he was doing and who he was doing it with. We don’t know where to start. I mean, clearly, there was some mistake but then, he must’ve had something to do with… whoever did this? I mean, they wouldn’t just do it to a stranger, would they?” Her voice broke and she raised her hand to rub her forehead like she was hoping she could massage some hidden knowledge into life. “Sorry, it’s just so bewildering. I didn’t even know about you.”
It was a plea and an accusation and Grace had no idea what to do with it. So she said her goodbyes.
At home, she told Deirdre that Neville was getting better. There’d been some kind of infection in the nail wound at first but that had been fixed and now he just had to wait for the bones to heal and the scars to fade. They told him he’d probably have problems with arthritis when he got older but that he should regain most of the use of the hand.
“He’s not in bed or anything,” she told Deirdre. “He just stays in his room. He can’t do much but he’s reading and listening to music, and he… he doesn’t seem that bothered.”
Deirdre looked up from the potatoes she was peeling.
“That’s a funny thing to say, and you don’t seem that sure about it either, love?”
“It’s just… well, I suppose I expected him to be angry or scared or something. But he just sits there, like nothing happened. He still laughs and makes jokes and all but I feel like I’m not gettin’ him. Like there’s something I should ask him, some important question, but I dunno what it is. If I could just figure out the right thing to ask, I feel like he’d tell me what’s really going on.” Grace stared morosely into the cup of tea she was nursing at the table. “I’m not making any sense, am I? It’s just, like, for the first time, I feel too young for him.”
She had the same look about her as she did when she was twelve or thirteen and she used to sit at the very same table after coming in from school, going on about girls who whispered when she came by, or ran off to lunch ahead of her, casting unfathomable looks behind them.
She’d grown up so fast, Deirdre thought now, and she’d crashed into the world th
e same way every young woman had to. There could be no fixing things with lollipops and stickers now, no protecting with kneepads and helmets, just constantly bearing witness. That was the job, right? She’d take what she could get, always.
Deirdre put down the potato, rubbed her hands on the tea towel, and came and sat at the table.
“He’ll get better, love. And I don’t just mean his hand. He’s had an awful shock and I suppose it’d make you look at your life and what you’re doing. It’ll take him a while to figure it all out. Is he going back to college when he’s better?”
“I don’t know, Mam. He won’t talk about that. He just goes on about whatever he’s reading. This week, it’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you know it’s the first book in this series that everyone is talkin’ about. She’s like a detective, but she’s kinda bad too, and you don’t really know where she came from.”
“Have you read it, love?”
“Nah, but I think I will. He tells me bits, it sounds good but really complicated. He has my head in a twist with it. But maybe if I read it, I’ll have a better idea of what he’s thinkin’? Do you think that could work, Mam?”
Grace’s hope was like a hammer on some soft part of her brain.
“Maybe. But, Grace love, he might not know what he’s feeling himself.” Deirdre took one of her daughter’s hands in hers. “He’s had a terrible experience. The pain alone. And he must’ve been terrified, and maybe he still is. So give him some time. He won’t be himself for a while. But if,” she hurried on, seeing her daughter’s face tense, “if you think he’s worth it, then you stick with him. He needs someone to be a normal friend to him now. So if that’s what you want to do, do it, but don’t think it’ll be easy. He’ll be a mess, inside and out, for a while.”
Grace didn’t say anything but she squeezed Deirdre’s hand back – two squeezes, a pause, and then one more. Deirdre played it back to her and smiled.
After Grace, Kevin and herself had dinner – Fergal was out and Conor had said he would eat at his friend’s – Deirdre put on her denim jacket and trainers. She popped her head into the sitting room where Grace and Kevin were watching Fair City.
“I’m just running out to see Pauline for a quick chat. I’ll be back in an hour. Will ye be alright?”
Grace just rolled her eyes. Kevin slithered his gaze from the screen for the briefest of seconds to give her a glazed smile. At least some things were normal, she thought as she closed the door behind her.
It was a breezy evening. She was meeting Pauline down where the River Liffey ran along the fields behind the estate. There was a little spot there with a bench on the bank, hidden behind some trees so that no nosey parkers could be watching you. They’d stumbled on it years ago when Pauline used to come over from Finglas to visit, and after she moved here, it became their go-to place whenever they wanted to have a quick chat, a quick cry, or a quick rant. It had been well used over the years.
Pauline was already sitting on the bench.
“Hey, Pauline. So where’s the fire? Is something wrong?”
Her friend’s face was paler than usual and some of her fizz was missing but then she’d not been herself since the whole Neville thing. Deirdre had had to tell her what was going on when she went looking for Gerrity’s number but at first, Pauline wouldn’t even consider the idea that Neville could be seriously hurt.
“He’s my cousin, Dee. Alright, he’s a dealer, but kidnapping? I just can’t believe it.”
Deirdre had pressed her and, finally, Pauline’d got her phone and dialled the number she had for Gerrity, insisting that she’d find out what was going on herself. But the number didn’t work and so she’d gone, none too happily, to ask Michael, who was on a rare visit home and playing one of those shooting games on the Xbox in the living room. Deirdre stood at the door, hating herself. It was bad enough that Pauline had to face off with Michael, who was ranting that he couldn’t give the number to any eejit off the street, but in doing so, she was also admitting to her friend that she knew all along what was really going on. Friends weren’t always supposed to tell you the truth, Deirdre thought. Sometimes you needed them more to help keep your fantasies alive. Deirdre wouldn’t be able to do that for Pauline any more.
When Michael stuffed a piece of paper with the number on it into Deirdre’s hand, he’d grabbed her wrist hard. There was a new venom in his sullen eyes.
“I spose ye think you’re all that now,” he’d whispered. “Won’t last. He’s a blow-in, hasn’t got what it takes. This is no place for part-timers and ye can tell him I said so.”
She’d had no idea what he was talking about but Michael was always shooting his mouth off and she hadn’t had time then to follow it up. Pauline hadn’t heard the rant. She’d stomped off after the initial showdown.
Now Pauline handed Deirdre a Styrofoam cup.
“Ah, thanks love. I could use a real coffee. So tell me, what’s bothering you? Is Michael in trouble again?” She had a horrible thought. “He’s not gone missing, has he?”
God knows, Deirdre didn’t like the little shit but she wouldn’t wish what happened to Neville on her worst enemy. Now that she knew exactly how close Michael and Gerrity were, she was even more terrified, mostly for Pauline though. No good was gonna come out of this and Pauline had suffered enough already. There was so much in the papers these days about drug gangs and feuds and shootings. Her father had been ranting about it only the other day when another body turned up in an alleyway on the south side of the city: some teenager killed as revenge for another lad shot last month.
“Wrecking the country, the little scuts,” her father had said on the phone. “We’d have driven them out, no doubt. Sure, we did it many times, north and south.”
She’d found his fury both reassuring and exhausting. Would people in this place never learn to just live?
“Nah, it’s not Michael,” Pauline said, slowly. “He’s gone and told me something. About what happened to Neville. I think he wanted me to tell ye cos he wants to hurt ye. I’m sorry, Dee, that boy hates you something rotten. I dunno why. I didn’t bring him up to be like that, but then, half the time even I don’t know who he is.” She stopped, shook her head, and then smiled. “D’ye remember when he was small and we brought him and Grace down here in the summer and they paddled in the water, splashing each other, and throwing stones into the pools? And then one time, d’ye remember, he lay down in the water, and pretended to swim, his little legs going up-and-down and his fat arms splashing water all over his face, and he was laughing so much.”
Deirdre did remember. It’d been a lovely day, Grace in a pink bathing suit with a polar bear on it, her toddler curls all wild above her head. When had she lost the curls? Must’ve been around five or six because she had straight hair when she made her Holy Communion. Deirdre remembered struggling to plait it. “Ow, Mam, you’re hurting me!”
She’d been so mad but in the end, she looked lovely and when she saw herself in the mirror, with the veil on top, she’d given her mother a big hug, her little hands reaching around Deirdre’s waist.
“Anyway, Michael says… he says, he knows who beat up Neville. Swears it wasn’t him and I want to believe him, Dee. Okay, he’s mixed up with Gerrity – I knew that all along but didn’t want to admit it – but I don’t think he’d hurt anyone. Hasn’t the stomach for it. And he was with me most of that day. You saw him yerself.”
Deirdre nodded but she wondered if any mother ever could know for sure what her kid might have the stomach for. It was always the cry, wasn’t it? “He couldn’t have done it, he was a lovely boy.” They were all lovely little boys and girls but that was no guarantee of anything. And that was the tragedy of it.
“So who was it?” she said. “Not that we can do anything about it, can we? We can’t exactly go to the guards. They wouldn’t be interested. They’d be only too delighted to know the drug lads are going after each other. Saves them some work.”
“It’s not that,” Pauline sa
id quietly. “I know we can’t do nothing, but… well, Michael says Fergal was there.”
Deirdre nearly dropped her coffee.
“Fergal? What would he be doing there?”
“Michael says he works for Gerrity now, driving, what’s he call it, oh yeah, driving the product. It’s been a couple of weeks, he says, and Gerrity often gets new lads to do the punishments. That’s what he called it, a punishment. To see if they’re up to it, a kind of test, I s’pose.”
Pauline blurted it all out, fast, as if the words had been piling up painfully behind her teeth.
“Jesus, I’d no idea Michael was in so deep. I’m so sorry, Dee.”
“Fergal?”
Deirdre knew she sounded like a fool, repeating the word over and over but she couldn’t help it. She felt dizzy suddenly. She put her coffee down on the bench and stood up. She paced up and down in front of her friend, who was reaching for another cigarette.
“Gimme one of those.”
“Ah, Dee. Sure, you’ve given up for years now. Ye don’t want to start again.”
“Just gimme a fecking fag, Pauline.”
She walked down to the bank of the river, her head reeling. She felt sick, partly from the nicotine after all these years but mostly because she had no idea what was happening to her life. She bent over her knees, retched, but nothing came. After a minute, she came back to the bench, sat down again, dropped the cigarette, and watched Pauline’s black boot grind it out in the grass. Her friend put her hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Dee. I had to tell ye. Not cos Michael wanted it but you had to know.”
“Of course, you did the right thing,” Deirdre said, taking Pauline’s hand and looking straight into her face. “I should’ve known it was something dodgy. He’s got no fixed schedule, sleeps for hours some days, he’s out at night, but not always drinking. I’m an eejit, Pauline. I should’ve known.”
“Sure, we don’t let ourselves know what we can’t handle,” Pauline said and her eyes were red and watery. “Why would we? We can’t change this shit so we might as well ignore it as best we can. Like I told ye, I’ve been doin’ it for years, Dee.”
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