Keeping 13

by Chloe Walsh

  Reeling, I sat there, cold to the bone, and listened to his truth.

  "I couldn't get him off me," he strangled out, chest heaving. "I knew she needed help – I fucking knew it – but I couldn't fight him off. I couldn't do anything!" Shaking his head, he let out a humorless laugh as tears trickled down his cheeks. "And my brother, my eleven-year-old baby brother, had to get him off me." Sniffing, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand and choked out a harsh sob. "While she stood by and did nothing."

  "Your mother?"

  "Who else."

  I let that sink in for a moment before asking, "And now?" My voice was thick with emotion, but I forced myself to keep my shit together and continue. "What happens now?"

  "The same thing that always happens," he muttered. "Nothing."

  "With your Ma?" I pushed, pressing my hand to my knee to stop it from shaking. "I mean, the Gards obviously know what your Da was doing to ye, and they'll arrest him when they find him, but her?" I shook my head, struggling to take it all in. "There's no consequences for taking a backseat? You're just supposed to go back and live with her?" I swallowed down my anger and hissed, "In that house?"

  Joey shrugged. "Didn't you hear? She's a victim, too. She needs to be supported."

  "Shannon told me," I muttered, rubbing my jaw. "That's so messed up, lad."

  "Yeah, well, it's on Darren now," Joey spat, blinking back his tears. "He can figure it all out because I'm done. I c-can't f-fucking –" his words broke off and he exhaled another hitched sob. "D-do this anymore," he finished with a sniffle. "I c-can't forget and I won't ever forgive."

  I didn't know what to say to that. I didn't know what to say to any of it. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this conversation. For these people and their pain.

  "Your sister loves you," I told him, feeling the need to tell him that, so that he knew at least one person in his world cared.

  "My sister loves you," he replied wearily.

  "She needs you," I added, ignoring the way my heart slammed wildly in my chest. "And from what I hear, your little brothers need you too, lad."

  "Because I'm foundations," he choked out. "That's it – that's all I am to them."

  "Foundations?" I frowned. "What does that mean?"

  "It means I'm the guy who goes around cleaning up everyone else in my family's shit." He dropped his head and clasped the back of his neck. "It means I'm the fucking mother."

  "Well," I exhaled heavily and stretched my legs out, trying to ease the burn in my thighs. "You're one hell of a mother, Joey the hurler."

  "Someone has to be," he muttered as he ran a hand through his hair.

  "Well, you did a good job," I told him. "And you've come too far to throw it all away on a temporary high, lad."

  "The fuck would you know about it?" he sneered.

  "I know you're trying to escape," I shot back. "That much is perfectly clear. You want to forget about the shite for a while – and Jesus, I don't blame you – but it's temporary. It' not real, Joey. And it's not going to fix anything. All of your problems will still be there waiting for you, regardless of how much powder you snort up your nose or how many tablets you toss back your throat. You can smoke all the weed you want, drown yourself in a bottle of whiskey, shoot yourself up with every drug known to mankind and it won't change a damn thing because life will still be waiting in the wings to kick your ass when you come to. I also know that if you keep going down this road, you'll get to a point where you won't be able to find your way back."

  "Easy for you to say," he shot back, tone bitter. "You've never seen a hard day in your life."

  "You're absolutely right," I agreed. "I don't know what you're going through. I have no fucking clue what it feels like to be you, and I'm damn glad for that. But I have my own demons, lad. My own choices I had to make, where it would have been so much easier to pop a few tablets to kill the pain when my body was falling the fuck apart from the inside out, or use steroids to build up my body instead of grafting in the gym six hours a day. I know that sounds like nothing in the grand scheme of things, not compared to your family shite, but I didn't do it, Joey, not one single time. Because I knew that putting that shite in my body would only be a choice for so long before it stopped being a choice and started being a necessity."

  "Shit," he choked out, and then laughed humorlessly. "Where the fuck were you when I was sixteen, Kavanagh?" Sniffing, he wiped his eyes and sighed dejectedly. "Could've done with the pep talk back then."

  "Wrong school," I offered with a halfhearted shrug.

  "Wrong life," he whispered.

  I sighed heavily. "Yeah."

  There was a long stretch of silence before I spoke again.

  "Can I help?" I finally asked, feeling like a spare prick. "Can I do something for you?"

  "Yeah." With shaky hands, Joey clutched the basin of the sink and pulled himself to his feet. "You can loan me some clothes."

  We both knew that clothes wasn't what I meant, but I didn't push him – not when he seemed to be clinging to the edge.

  Without saying another word, I stood up and walked back into my room. Pulling random items of clothing out of my dresser, I tossed them into the bathroom and left him to it.

  Confused and on edge, I walked stiffly over to my window and stared out into the darkness while I waited for him to come back out, watching as droplets of rain pelted against the pane of glass.

  So this is their life, I thought to myself, this is what she was hiding from you.

  Gripping the window sill, I ignored the pain in my body and concentrated on my whirling thoughts, desperately trying to find a solution for something I wasn't entirely sure could be solved. One thing I knew for sure was that I could never untangle myself from this girl. And what's more, I didn’t want to.

  I knew this wasn't good. Jesus, a blind man could see I needed to run far, far away from this situation, but I couldn’t. Fucked up as it all seemed, I was quite content to remain right here, wrapped up in her personal breakdown. More than that, I wanted to wade in and do something, anything, to help her brother. It wasn't even just about Shannon for me anymore. It was about Joey and three other little kids I hadn't even laid eyes on. I wanted to help them all. My conscience demanded nothing less from me.

  Several minutes passed by before the bathroom door swung open and Joey appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a pair of my grey sweats and a white t-shirt, and looking like absolute shite. Clean shite, I mentally acknowledged, minus the vomit and smell.

  "Thanks for the clothes," he muttered, eyes bloodshot, face deathly pale. "Do you have a phone I could use?"

  My jaw ticked. I wasn't sure about this. Was he planning on busting out of here? "Why?"

  "Because I need to call my girlfriend."

  I eyed him warily. "Your girlfriend?"

  "Yeah, my girlfriend," he hissed. "Can I use your phone or not?"

  Uncertain, I took my phone out and handed it to him. "You don't have to leave. You can stay, lad. For as long as you need."

  Ignoring me, Joey leaned against the dresser and stabbed his trembling finger against the keypad of my phone, messing up repeatedly to the point where he threw his head back and roared. "Come the fuck on!"

  "What's her number?" I asked, taking the phone from him. "Call it out and I'll dial it for you."

  "I warned her off you, you know," he said, handing the phone back to me. "Told her you'd be leaving – told her not to get her hopes up on you."

  I shrugged, not one bit surprised given my current popularity status with his family. "What's her number?"

  He muttered a string of numbers before saying, "Don't let her down. Whatever you're doing, Kavanagh, don't fuck my sister over."

  I tapped in the number and pressed call before handing it back to him and saying, "I won't."

  With wary, mistrustful eyes, Joey placed the phone to his ear, body shaking and jolting violently. "Aoife?" he whispered a few seconds later. "It's me."

  Whatever his girlfrien
d said in response to that caused Joey to shudder.

  Like visibly fucking shudder.

  "I know," he whispered, clenching his eyes shut. "I know, okay? I know I promised. I fucked up." Turning his back to me, he ran a hand through his hair and choked out, "I'm so fucking sorry, baby."

  Feeling uncomfortable, I decided to go downstairs in search of the others and leave Joey Lynch to his phone call/groveling. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear it anyway, not when my head was already bursting to the seams with more information than I could process.

  Gibsie was shoveling coal into an already roaring fire when I walked into the sitting room, and the girls were curled up on the couch. Correction; Claire was curled up on the couch with her legs tucked beneath her. Shannon, on the other hand, was sitting as straight as a poker on the edge of the seat beside her friend. Gibsie had obviously dragged the couch over to the fire, something we always did when the weather was bad out, and I was grateful. I wanted her to be warm. I needed the peace of mind.

  I cleared my throat before stepping inside, making a conscious effort not to startle her. She jumped clean out of her skin anyway and sprang off the couch, but the small smile she gave me assured me that I was a welcome surprise. "Is he okay?" she asked, wide-eyed and panicked.

  Not even close. Nodding, I forced a smile.

  "Oh, thank god." Her small shoulders sagged and she pressed a hand to her chest. "Are you sure?"

  No.

  "He's sure," Gibsie answered for me. Placing the shovel back into the coal bucket, he stood up, stretched his arms over his head, and winked over at me. "All's well in the world again."

  "See?" Claire added, giving her an encouraging smile. "I told you that you had nothing to worry about."

  Shannon didn't look so convinced. Her gaze flicked between Gibs and Claire before returning to me. "Are you sure?" she asked, looking at me with those haunting blue eyes.

  I opened my mouth to lie, to tell her what she needed to hear, that everything was okay and she had nothing to worry about, but the words, "No, I'm not sure," came out instead. I fucked it even further by saying, "He's in a bad way, actually. A really bad way," and then I topped it off with, "I'm worried about him."

  Shannon's face fell and both Claire and Gibsie groaned in unison.

  "Nice one, Cap," Gibsie muttered. "We only spent the last hour telling her different."

  "Yeah, very comforting, Johnny," Claire added sulkily.

  "Well, I'm not going to lie to her," I snapped. Running a hand through my hair in frustration, I looked at Shannon. "I'm not going to do that, okay?"

  Shannon nodded stiffly. "I should go check on him." She hurried past me, only to pause in the doorway. "Is it okay if I go up and check –"

  "Go," I told her before she finished. "Don't ask for my permission, Shannon. You don't need it."

  She nodded once more before slipping out of the room.

  "Maybe once in a while, you could attempt to twist the truth," Gibsie offered, waving a finger around aimlessly. "You know, romance a situation up a tad to spare feelings and unnecessary stress."

  "By lying to her?" I narrowed my eyes at him. "Yeah, lad, that sounds like real solid advice. Tell me how that's going to work for me?"

  Gibsie shrugged. "Fuck if I know, lad, but that girl is buckling under the weight of some pretty heavy issues right now, so I'm thinking a few white lies might be easier to take than the blunt truth."

  I opened my mouth to protest but stopped myself. "You're right."

  "Yeah, I know," Gibsie mused. "Contrary to popular belief – mostly my mother's – it does happen sometimes."

  The Crazy Frog/Axel F song blasted through the room then, loud and annoying as fuck, and causing Gibsie to reach for his phone and me to groan in sheer fucking despair.

  "It's mine," Claire chirped, holding her phone up. She glanced at the phone and grimaced. "It's my Mam again."

  "Don't tell her that you're with me," Gibsie warned. "Whatever you do, babe, do not tell that woman that I'm with you."

  Claire glared at him. "Who else would I be with? Besides, there's no point since she saw me getting into your car!"

  He shrugged uncomfortably. "She'll kill you."

  "Yeah, Gerard, I know," she hissed before clicking receive and putting the phone to her ear. "Hi, Mam – yeah, I know what you said…yeah, I know, Mam, but it's not what you think…" Putting her head down, Claire hurried past me, speaking so low and fast that I couldn't make out a word of it.

  "Why will her mother kill her?" I asked, eyeing Gibsie with suspicion. "What have you done that you haven't told me about?"

  Looking everywhere but my face, Gibsie muttered something about 'a huge fucking mistake' before bolting after her.

  I hoped for Gibsie's sake he didn't make that kind of mistake with Claire because Hughie Biggs had a temper on him when the notion took him, and I wasn't in any fit state to stop them from killing each other.

  "Well, shite," I mumbled, staring after them both. "The drama just keeps on coming."

  18

  Stay With Me

  Shannon

  I wasn't sure what I was expecting to find when I walked into Johnny's bedroom, but my brother passed out on his bed wasn't it. He was lying diagonally across the foot of Johnny's huge bed, but his feet were still planted on the floor.

  Slipping inside, I quietly padded over to the bed and stared down at Joey's sleeping form. His lips were slightly parted and his breathing was deep and even. I sagged in relief. For a moment, I'd feared he was dead.

  My gaze flicked to where he was still clutching Johnny's phone. Reaching out, I gently pried it out of his hand, careful not to wake him. I was terrified of what would happen when he did wake. Where would he go? Would he come home? Go to Aoife's? Go back to Shane Holland and his scumbag friends?

  I honestly didn't know and the uncertainty worried me more than my father's disappearance. Because I cared about Joey. He was important to me. For most of my life, he was the most important person in it. The thought of something happening to him was unbearable. It was too much to take, and I honestly didn't think I could take a whole lot more of anything.

  I remembered how it was last year. The fighting at home had been terrible – the mood exceptionally arctic. Dad was spending all of his time at the pub, and Mam was rotating between working herself into the ground and falling apart in her bedroom.

  You see, Dad had been having yet another affair with one of the barmaids, an affair that had come out in glorious fashion a few short months later, and Mam knew. She knew and instead of throwing him out, she took to the bed. Sean hadn't yet turned two, and was a handful. Between cutting his back teeth and screaming through the night, all of us were exhausted.

  Things were getting worse for me at BCS, and Joey was losing his temper more often. Talking back to teachers, getting into brawls at school and even bigger brawls at home, until one day, he had a new group of friends. Friends who were too old to be hanging around with a school boy. Friends who had no business showing up to the school for drop offs.

  After that, Joey began to withdraw. He turned secretive and disconnected. He didn't care about anything. Not school or hurling. He was just disappearing.

  Until one day at school, one of the girls from his class, the pretty blonde who always watched him, a girl I was sure Joey had never spoken more than two words to, chased him outside to the school yard and stopped him from climbing into that car. I knew this because I, too, had followed at a distance. The girl had caused an unmerciful scene in the carpark and had waved her phone around at those older boys in the car. And then she did something that had shocked me. She fisted his school jumper in both hands and dragged his face down to hers, kissing him right there, without thought for suspension had they been caught.

  I never did find out what Aoife said that day, but whatever it was, it caused Joey to walk away from the car and climb into hers instead.

  After that, things slowly started to change for him. He started to come back to
us, piece by piece. Because Aoife gave him something that day, something to cling to. Hope for the future.

  And then my father took that something away from him again.

  He took his hope.

  I saw it in his eyes when he visited me at the hospital; the light bulb Aoife had switched on inside of him had been slowly dimmed out to the point where he was back to darkness.

  If he could just sleep it off, sleep whatever he had taken right out of his system, then maybe he would wake up with some clarity. A clear head and the ability to do some calm, rational thinking. Maybe he could –

  "Shan? My mam called and I need to go home." Claire's voice cut through my thoughts and I swung around to find her standing in the doorway. Pressing my finger to my lips, I begged her with my eyes not to make a sound as I slowly crept out of the room.

  "Sorry," she whispered when we were both standing in the landing with the bedroom door closed behind us. "I didn't realize he was asleep."

  I didn't respond until we were at the top of the staircase and far away from the door. "It's okay. Neither did I." On shaky legs, I descended the steps, feeling the burn in my lungs as I moved. Since leaving the hospital, I'd spent the majority of my time holed up in my room. All the walking today had taken it out of my body. Niggling pains and aches were resurfacing and without the prescribed pain relief I had forgotten to take before I left my house, I was feeling every one of them. "What were you going to tell me?"

  "I need to go home," Claire replied in a huffy tone. "My Mam's been calling non-stop." She rolled her eyes for emphasis. "She says if Gerard doesn't bring me home by ten, she's locking me out of the house." Huffing out a breath, she added, "It a quarter to ten now."

  "Would that be such a bad thing?" Gibsie waggled his brows, joining us in the hallway. "You could always stay with me."

  Claire rolled her eyes again. "It's an empty threat, she would never lock me out, but he needs to take me home," she continued, wisely refraining from going back and forth with Gibsie. "And I was wondering if you wanted to sleep over?"