‘No.’
‘Stand straight. Hold your arms out to the side.’
The guard didn’t tell Roman his name. Nor did he look at the boy as he issued his instructions. He ran his hands along Roman’s arms, down his chest, his legs.
‘Open your mouth.’ Roman could see stiff grey hairs poking out of the man’s nose. Feel the man’s breath – hot and stale – against his face. He pushed a stick inside Roman’s mouth. Like an ice pop stick. Scraped it against the inside of his cheek. Put it into a sample bottle.
‘Turn your pockets out. Take the laces out of your runners. And the belt out of your trousers. Put them in this bag.’
His fingers were pushed, one by one, onto a piece of inky sponge then pressed into individual boxes on a form.
‘Sign there.’
Roman signed.
‘Follow me.’
Roman followed the man down a corridor. He wondered if he would be put in a cell. He had seen prison cells on the telly. His feet felt heavy. He kept walking.
He wasn’t sure which garda station he was in. He had sat in the back of the police car, kept his head down. The car had jerked to a stop and Roman looked but they were at the back of a building he didn’t recognise. He was led inside between two guards.
Now, he was in a small, airless room. The walls were painted a dull grey. There were no windows and the fluorescent tube overhead filled the room with a harsh white light.
In the centre of the room, there was a table, two chairs on one side, one chair on the other. The guard pointed to the single chair and Roman sat on it. The guard left. Roman heard the rattle of keys, the door being locked and the sharp clip of the man’s shoes against the floor, growing fainter.
Now the only sound he could hear was his breathing. It sounded loud. Fast.
Roman shifted in the hard plastic chair. He had pins and needles in his legs. He couldn’t remember when he had last eaten. He didn’t feel hungry. He didn’t feel anything.
He jumped when the door opened. Two men entered. Roman recognised one of them. Cillian Larkin. He stooped his head as he walked through the door. Roman had met him a few times at the youth club. He had taught him how to play chess. He was OK. Decent. He nodded briefly at Roman, moved towards a machine in the corner that looked like a DVD player. He pressed a button on it. A red light came on and in a small monitor on the wall behind the machine, Roman could see himself now. He looked smaller on the screen. He looked like a scared little kid. He sat straighter in the chair, folded his arms across his chest, pressed his hands into his armpits to stop them shaking.
Cillian looked at his watch. ‘It is twenty-three hundred hours on Friday the twenty-first of February, 2014. The suspect, Roman Matus, has been cautioned. Present at this interview are Detective Cillian Larkin and Detective Michael Murphy.’
The two detectives sat down on the other side of the table. Cillian leaned forward. ‘Your mother’s outside. She can sit in on this interview, since you’re a minor.’
Roman shook his head. He hadn’t known she would be in the bank on Wednesday morning. Her face, when she saw him. The way it fell. The shape his name made on her mouth. Like she couldn’t believe it was him. Like she still thought the best of him.
He could get through this, he thought, so long as he didn’t have to see her face.
‘You have to say it out loud. For the tape,’ Cillian explained, pointing towards the monitor.
‘No,’ said Roman. His mouth was dry.
‘Speak up,’ said the other man. Detective Murphy.
Roman cleared his throat. ‘No,’ he said again. ‘I don’t want her here.’
Cillian looked at his file. ‘And I see you’ve waived your right to a solicitor.’
‘Yes,’ said Roman.
Cillian shook his head. ‘That is a bad idea, Roman. Do you understand the seriousness of this crime? Armed robbery? Possibly attempted murder? We can place you at the scene and we have witnesses who will say they saw you with a gun in your hand. We’ve taken your fingerprints. We’ll know in the morning if your prints are on the gun that was used to shoot the victim, Mr Hartmann.’
Roman knew they would find his prints on Jimmy’s gun. He hadn’t worn gloves. It hadn’t occurred to him.
If it hadn’t been for the drawing, they might have gotten away with it. Roman wouldn’t owe Jimmy anything anymore. They’d be quits. Jimmy had given his word.
Jimmy had found it at the bottom of the old man’s safe deposit box, after he’d filled the pockets of his trousers, his shirt, his jacket with the neat bundles of notes he’d lifted from the box.
‘Don’t touch that,’ the old man had barked when Jimmy’d reached for the drawing. Jimmy had ignored him, slid the stiff piece of paper from the clear plastic folder it was in. Roman glanced at it. It was a charcoal drawing. They’d worked with charcoal in Art last year. It was a drawing of a woman kneeling in a field, holding the body of a man.
‘Come on,’ Roman had said. ‘You got what you wanted. Let’s go.’
‘Don’t fucken tell me what to do, you little runt,’ said Jimmy.
‘That is mine.’ The old man’s voice was loud then. Any louder and it would have been a shout. ‘It is not for the likes of you.’
Jimmy had grinned. ‘Maybe this little scribble is worth a bob or two and if it isn’t, I can always use it to wipe my arse, can’t I?’ He put the drawing back inside the folder, slid it inside his jacket.
That was when the man had pushed himself out of the chair with his good leg. Threw himself towards Jimmy. Jimmy shoved the man away from him so that he fell, landed on the floor. Jimmy reached for the gun that he had tucked into the waistband of his trousers, pointed it at the man’s head.
Roman hurled himself at Jimmy. ‘Get off me,’ Jimmy had shouted, reaching for Roman’s hair, his eyes. His fingers clawed and pulled at the boy’s balaclava. He reefed it off.
Roman reached for the gun in Jimmy’s hand, wrapping his fingers around the handle that was slippy with sweat. The old man shouted in a language Roman didn’t understand. The muzzle of the gun pointed this way and that. Jimmy’s fingers tightened around the trigger. The gun went off. The old man stopped shouting.
‘Will he be OK?’ Roman asked Cillian. ‘Mr Hartmann?’
‘A bit late to be concerned about the man’s welfare now, isn’t it?’ said the other policeman. There was contempt in his voice. Roman couldn’t blame him.
‘Who were the others? At the bank?’ the man barked at him.
Roman did not reply. He knew what would happen if he told the truth. To him. To Mama. He knew what Jimmy was capable of.
The silence in the room stretched like elastic. Cillian took his phone out of his pocket, swiped at the screen and pushed the phone across the desk towards Roman. ‘How well do you know this man?’
It was a picture of Lenny. Roman shrugged. ‘I don’t know him,’ he said. Inside his chest, his heart thumped like a judge’s gavel. What did the police know? And would Jimmy think that it was Roman who’d told them whatever it was they knew?
‘Did you start working for Jimmy Carty when you moved into his house? Or was it later?’ Cillian said.
Roman concentrated on an ink spot on the desk in front of him. Cillian sounded so certain of everything. Roman wished he felt certain of anything.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He knew the exact day. It was the one clean break day. That’s how he remembered it so clearly.
Roman had gotten used to things, he supposed. Uncle Lech being dead and the shabby room at Jimmy’s house and the telling of the lies to Babcia on the Sunday-night phone call and Mama not having time to do anything anymore except work and sleep. He didn’t like it. But he was used to it.
But nothing stays the same. He should have known that. One wrong move and everything tumbles down, like the houses of cards Roman used to make when he was a kid.
Mama fell on her way home from work late one night a
nd broke her arm. One clean break. That’s how the doctor in the hospital had described it, like it was a good thing.
That’s when he had started working for Jimmy.
She slid on a glassy slick of ice that she would have noticed if she hadn’t been so tired. She was always tired now.
She fell at the edge of the footpath, one foot lifted in readiness to cross the road, so that when she landed, it was in the shallow curve of the gutter at the edge of the road. Roman imagined her lying there. In the gutter. With her eyes closed, the scooped-out concrete of the gutter almost like a hammock around her. The pain in her arm – trapped beneath her body – and her ankle where she’d torn ligaments did not make itself known until later.
‘Your mother got lucky. It’s a clean break,’ the man in the white coat at the hospital said, after they’d spent hours sitting in hard plastic chairs in an overcrowded, overheated room that smelled of stale bodies and damp clothes.
‘I need to be at work in two hours,’ Mama had said.
The doctor looked at her then, as if he had just noticed her. As if he hadn’t known she was there until now.
‘What do you do?’ the doctor asked, placing the nib of his pen on another interminable form attached to a clipboard.
‘I’m a cleaner.’
Roman stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Made fists of them while the doctor scribbled the word in one of the blank boxes. She didn’t even seem to mind. The word. Saying it. Out loud. To strangers. To this self-satisfied man to whom Roman and Rosa were just two more people in a long procession of the walking wounded on whose behalf he would fill in forms that night.
Roman minded. ‘What are you getting your ma for Mother’s Day, Roman?’ Ian Flynn had shouted at him in the classroom, in front of everybody. Roman ignored him. Not that that ever worked. Not with Ian Flynn.
‘A scrubbing brush,’ Ian roared, his face creasing with his donkey laugh, his stomach quivering like an enormous jelly.
‘Maybe you could get your mother a cure for disappointment,’ piped up Meadhbh from the door of the room. ‘I’m sure she needs one after spawning an idiot like you.’
Roman had felt two things, equally and urgently. He felt grateful. That Meadhbh was his friend, his best friend, actually – well, his and Adam’s.
He felt shame too.
‘I’m a cleaner,’ Rosa said. She kept it short and simple.
‘Well, I’m afraid your cleaning days are over for the time being. Six weeks at least in plaster. And you need to keep the ankle elevated. Give the ligaments a chance to knit. You’ll just have to take it easy, eh? Get someone else to mop the floors, am I right?’
Rosa nodded, as if his suggestion were an option. As if there were somebody else she could count on to mop the floors in her stead.
One clean break and the cards they had been dealt came tumbling down, lay where they fell.
There was no safety net. No social welfare payment coming their way. No medical card. No sick leave.
There was nothing.
The rent was due on Friday. Roman opened their cupboard in the kitchen when they returned to the house, after he’d helped Mama get into bed. There were two tins of chopped tomatoes, half a packet of pasta, a cup of rice, a few scoops of porridge oats, two mucky potatoes, a jar of instant coffee.
At ten past nine in the morning, Rosa’s mobile rang. Mrs Mulligan. ‘I don’t appreciate being let down like this,’ she began when Roman answered the phone. ‘You’re already ten minutes late and if you’re any later, I’ll have to postpone my hair appointment.’
‘This is Roman. Rosa’s son.’
‘Oh.’
‘And you can fuck right off.’
‘How dare y—’
Roman hung up. The sense of satisfaction was short-lived. Mama would be angry. Mrs Mulligan was a weekly job. Thirty euro that could be depended on. That’s what Mama would say. As if anyone could depend on thirty euro. Roman filched two slices of bread from the Lithuanian couple’s cupboard, as well as a chunk of their cheese. He made a sandwich and left it on a plate, along with a glass of water, on the locker by her bed. She looked young when she was asleep. Sort of innocent, as if she had no idea what one clean break meant for them. Roman went to school. The afternoons, evenings and nights were long enough. School was a distraction. And he had his friends. Meadhbh and Adam. The other kids left him alone because of Meadhbh and Adam. Meadhbh mostly. Everybody liked Meadhbh. The few muffled comments here and there about him being a foreigner, or the smell of the weird food in his lunchbox, him not having a dad, him not having Nike high-tops, his hair being too long, his trousers too short. Nothing major. Nothing the other kids – even the Irish ones – didn’t get from time to time. Nothing he couldn’t handle.
The next day, the bill from the hospital arrived. It was addressed to his mother but Roman opened it. A hundred euro. Roman tore it into small pieces, put it inside an empty egg box in the green bin. He went to school. When he got home, Mama was still in bed. She struggled into a sitting position when he opened the door, and he saw the fear in her eyes, the way it drained when she saw that it was Roman at the door. He sat on the edge of her bed, careful to give her plastered arm, her swollen ankle, a wide berth. ‘We need to come up with a plan,’ Roman said. ‘While you’re getting better.’
Mama shook her head. ‘I don’t want you to worry about things like that. That’s my job.’
‘The rent is due tomorrow, isn’t it?’ Roman said.
‘I have it put by,’ she said, nodding towards the wooden box that her grandmother had given her when she was a girl. It was supposed to be a jewellery box.
‘What about next month’s rent?’ said Roman. Mama’s forehead was damp with sweat. Her hair, hanging like greasy curtains around her face, was dull and limp. The doctor had given her a plastic covering to put over the plaster on her arm in the shower but she hadn’t used it yet and Roman didn’t suggest that she should. He didn’t think she’d be able for the walk down the hall to the bathroom. Climbing into the bath, standing on her swollen ankle under the shower, trying to wash herself with one hand. Roman didn’t think she’d be able for any of that. She had only broken her arm but it seemed to Roman like she had done more than that, like she had broken something inside herself, something essential.
She looked exhausted, like a wrung-out cloth.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t want you to worry, Roman. I’ll speak to Jimmy and—’
‘No!’ The word came out louder than he’d intended.
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘Just ... I mean ... I’ll talk to him, OK?’
‘It’s not your responsibility, Roman.’
‘You said it was you and me, Mama. Against the world. Didn’t you?’ Mama’s smile was weak but there. She nodded.
Roman was in the kitchen when Jimmy came in.
‘ ... and the doctor at the hospital said she might be able to go back to work in three weeks. Maybe even less.’ Roman’s face flushed at the lie but Jimmy didn’t notice. He was busy shaking his head, slowly, like he was sad. Or disappointed. ‘Look, Romeo, if it were up to me ... but the bank manager doesn’t want to hear excuses when it comes to the mortgage, am I right? He won’t give a flyin’ fuck about you or your sad little story, will he?’
Jimmy looked at Roman. Waited, like he was expecting a response. Roman shook his head. ‘And you know, apart from the rent, your sweet mama owes me a not insignificant sum of money, let’s not forget.’
Roman didn’t mention the fact that it was Lech who had owed the money. There was no point. Not with Jimmy.
‘And I know I’m a bit of a pushover, especially when it comes to the fairer sex, and, let’s face it, they don’t come much fairer than Rosa, am I right?’ Jimmy smiled and nudged Roman in the ribs. Hard. ‘But I’m not runnin’ a charity here, know what I mean?’
Roman took a breath, steadied himself. ‘I will get a job.’
‘A little runt like you?’ said Jimmy.
‘No offence, kid, but no one’s going to be offering you a job any time soon.’
‘I could wash cars.’ Roman had seen people – men, granted – at traffic lights with brushes and pails of soapy water, swiping at the windscreens of the idling cars before the drivers had a chance to tell them not to.
Jimmy laughed again. He was always laughing. Loud laughs with no humour in them. ‘No right thinking man is going to let an underage immigrant within a mile of their wheels. Fuck knows what damage you’d cause.’
‘I’ll do anything, Jimmy.’ Roman knew he shouldn’t beg. He had told himself to keep calm. To talk to Jimmy man-to-man. Now, here he was with the begging bowl in his hands, shaking it under Jimmy’s nose.
Jimmy studied Roman like he was a page in the Racing Post. ‘Well ... I suppose I could ... maybe there is something you could do for me.’
‘A job?’ Roman felt something leap in his chest.
Jimmy shrugged. ‘Yeah. I suppose. I’ve an opening coming up in my ... business. I need a delivery man. Someone I can trust.’
An image of the small brown-paper packages that Jimmy used to slip to Uncle Lech swam to the surface of Roman’s mind. Jimmy hadn’t called them deliveries then. ‘I’ve a little something for your uncle,’ he’d say.
A little something.
‘I can do that,’ said Roman and his voice was filled with the kind of conviction that belonged to a man. A delivery man.
‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a trial run, see how you go, alright?’ said Jimmy. ‘As a favour, yeah?’
Roman nodded. ‘I won’t let you down.’
Jimmy looked amused. ‘Seems like you’re the man of the house now, young Romeo, wha’?’ He laughed, sat down and put his feet on a kitchen chair. ‘And I know you won’t let me down. Will you?’ Jimmy’s pale blue eyes bore into Roman’s face like a drill. ‘I won’t,’ Roman said. He knew he wouldn’t get a second chance. He’d have to be good. Be the best delivery man Jimmy had ever had.
‘And this is top secret, yeah?’ Jimmy tapped his nose with his finger. ‘Just between you and me. No need for your mother to worry her pretty little head about it, OK?’
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