by Tana French
The wind had grown a cold edge; I turned up my coat collar and dug my hands into my pockets. The last time I set foot on that beach, I had been fifteen: just starting to shave like I meant it, just getting used to my brand-new shoulders, just a week into going out with someone for the first time, a golden girl from Newry called Amelia who laughed at all my jokes and tasted like strawberries. I was different, back then: electric and reckless, body-slamming headlong onto any chance of a laugh or a dare, made out of enough momentum to shoot me straight through stone walls. When we guys arm-wrestled to impress the girls, I took on big Dean Gorry and beat him three times running, even though he was twice my size, because that was how badly I wanted to make Amelia clap for me.
I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childhood. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.
7
And of course, of bloody fucking course, Dina was waiting for me.
The first thing you notice about my little sister Dina is that she’s the kind of beautiful that makes people, men and women both, forget what they were talking about when she came in. She looks like one of those old pen-and-ink sketches of fairies: slight as a dancer, with skin that never tans, full pale lips and huge blue eyes. She walks like she’s skimming an inch above the ground. This artist she used to go out with once told her she was “pure pre-Raphaelite,” which would have been cuter if he hadn’t dumped her flat on her arse two weeks later. Not that this came as a surprise. The second thing that stands out about Dina is that she is crazy as a bag of cats. Various therapists and psychiatrists have diagnosed various things along the way, but what it comes down to is that Dina is no good at life. It takes a knack that she’s never quite got hold of. She can fake it for months at a stretch, sometimes even a year, but it takes concentration like she’s tightrope walking, and in the end she always wobbles and goes flying. Then she ditches her lousy McJob du jour, her lousy boyfriend du jour ditches her—men who like them vulnerable love Dina, right up until she shows them what vulnerable actually means—and she turns up on my doorstep or Geri’s, generally at some ungodly hour of the morning, making bugger-all sense.
That night, to avoid becoming predictable, she showed up at my work instead. We work out of Dublin Castle, and since it’s a tourist attraction—eight hundred years’ worth of the buildings that have defended this city, in one way or another—anyone can walk straight in off the street. Richie and I were heading across the cobblestones towards the HQ building at a fast stride, and I was arranging the facts in my head ready to lay out for O’Kelly, when a slip of darkness detached itself from the corner of shadow by a wall and flew towards us. Both of us jumped. “Mikey,” Dina said, in a fierce undertone, fingers taut as wires clamping around my wrist. “You have to come get me now. Everyone keeps pushing.”
Last time I had seen her, maybe a month before, she had had long rippling fair hair and some kind of floating flowery dress. Since then she had gone grunge: her hair was dyed glossy black and chopped off in a flapper-style bob—the fringe looked like she might have done it herself—and she was wearing a huge, ragged gray cardigan over a white slip, and biker boots. It’s always a bad sign when Dina changes her look. I could have kicked myself for going so long without checking.
I moved her away from Richie, who was trying to get his jaw off the cobblestones. He looked like he was seeing me in a whole new light. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. What’s up?”
“I can’t, Mikey, I can feel stuff in my hair, you know, the wind scraping into my hair? It hurts, it keeps hurting, I can’t find the, not the off switch the button the way it stops.”
My stomach turned into one hard heavy lump. “OK,” I said. “OK. Do you need to come back to my place for a while, yeah?”
“We have to go. You have to listen.”
“We’re going, sweetheart. Just hang on for one second, OK?” I steered her to the steps of one of the castle buildings, closed up for the night after the day’s crop of tourists. “Sit there for me.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
She was on the edge of panicking. “Right over there,” I said, pointing. “I need to get rid of my partner, so you and I can head home. It’ll take me two seconds.”
“I don’t want your partner. Mikey, there won’t be room, how are we going to squash the fit?”
“Exactly. I don’t want him either. I’ll just send him on his merry way, and then we can get going.” I sat her down on the steps. “OK?”
Dina pulled her knees up and shoved her mouth into the crook of her elbow. “OK,” she said, muffled. “Come on, OK?”
Richie was pretending to check his phone messages, to give me privacy. I kept one eye on Dina. “Listen, Richie. I may not be able to make tonight. Are you still on for it?”
I could see the question marks bouncing up and down in his head, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. “Sure.”
“Good. Pick a floater. He—or she, if you want Whatshername—can put in for overtime, although you might try to get across the message that waiving it would be a better career move. If anything goes down out there, you ring me at once. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s unimportant, it doesn’t matter if you think you can handle it, you ring me. Got that?”
“Got it.”
“In fact, if nothing goes down, ring me anyway, just so I know I’m up to speed. Every hour, on the hour. If I don’t pick up, you keep ringing till I do. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Tell the Super I had an emergency but not to worry, I’ll have it under control and be back on the job by tomorrow morning at the latest. Brief him on today and on our plans for tonight—can you do that?”
“I can probably manage that, yeah.”
The twist to the corner of Richie’s mouth said he didn’t appreciate the question, but his ego was low on my priority list right then. “No ‘probably,’ old son: manage it. Tell him the floaters have their assignments for tomorrow, so do the searchers, and we need a sub-aqua team to start work on the bay as early as possible. As soon as you’re done with him, get moving. You’ll need food, warm clothes, a packet of caffeine tabs—coffee’s no good, you don’t want to be pissing every half-hour—and a pair of thermal-imaging goggles: we have to assume this guy has some kind of night-vision gear, and I don’t want him getting the jump on you. And check your gun.” Most of us go a full career without ever unholstering. Some people take that as a license to get sloppy.
“Yeah, I’ve done a couple of stakeouts before,” Richie said, evenly enough that I couldn’t tell whether he was giving me the finger. “See you back here, tomorrow morning?”
Dina was getting antsy, biting off threads from the sleeve of her jumper. “No,” I said. “Not here. I’ll try to get out to Brianstown at some point tonight, but that may or may not happen. If I don’t make it, I’ll meet you down at the hospital for the post-mortems. Six A.M., and for God’s sake don’t be late, or we’ll spend the rest of the morning unknotting Cooper’s knickers.”
“No probs.” Richie pocketed his phone. “Might see you out there. Otherwise, we’ll just have to do our best not to fuck up, yeah?”
I said, “Don’t fuck up.”
“We won’t,” Richie said, more gently; he almost sounded like he was being reassuring. “Good luck.”
He gave me a nod and headed for the door of HQ. He was smart enough not to glance back. “Mikey,” Dina hissed, clutching a fistful of the back of my coat. “Can we go?”
I took a fraction of a second to look up at the dimming sky
and throw out a hard urgent prayer to anything that was up there: Let my man have more restraint than I’m giving him credit for. Don’t let him go rushing into Richie’s arms. Make him wait for me.
“Come on,” I said, putting a hand on Dina’s shoulder—she shoved herself up against my side, all sharp elbows and fast breath, like a spooked animal. “Let’s go.”
* * *
* * *
The first thing you need to do with Dina on days like this is get her indoors. A big part of what looks like madness is actually just tension, free-floating terror growing bigger as it gets buffeted around in currents and hooks onto everything that drifts past: she ends up frozen rigid by the immensity and the unpredictability of the world, like a prey animal trapped in the open. Get her into a familiar enclosed space with no strangers, no loud noises and no sudden movements, and she calms down, even has long lucid patches, while the two of you wait it out together. Dina was one of the factors I kept in mind when I was buying my apartment, after my ex and I sold our house. We picked a good time to split, or so I keep telling myself: the property market was on its way up, and my half of the equity got me a deposit on a fourth-floor two-bed in the Financial Services Center. It’s central enough that I can walk to work, trendy enough that it made me feel a little less like a loser for failing at marriage, and high enough that Dina won’t be spooked by street noise.
“Yes thank God about time,” she said, on a wild rush of relief, when I unlocked the apartment. She shoved past me and pressed her back against the wall by the door, eyes closed, taking deep breaths. “Mike, I need a towel shower, can I?”
I found her a towel. She dumped her handbag on the floor, vanished into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.
Dina on a bad one could stay in the shower all night, as long as the hot water doesn’t run out and she knows you’re outside the door. She says she feels better in water because it makes her mind go blank, which is crammed with so many kinds of Jung that I wouldn’t even know where to start. As soon as I heard the water running and her starting to sing to herself, I shut the living-room door and phoned Geri.
I hate making this call more than I hate almost anything in the world. Geri has three kids, ten and eleven and fifteen, a job doing the books for her best friend’s interior design company, and a husband she doesn’t see enough of. All those people need her. No one alive needs anything from me except Dina and Geri and my father, and what Geri needs most is for me not to make this phone call. I do everything in my power. It had been years since I had let her down.
“Mick! Hang on a sec for me, till I get this wash started—” Slam, click of buttons, mechanical hum. “Now. Is everything OK? Did you get my message?”
“Yeah, I got it. Geri—”
“Andrea! I saw that! You give it back to him right now or I’ll let him have your one, and you don’t want that, do you? No, you do not.”
“Geri. Listen to me. Dina’s losing it again. I have her over at my place, she’s taking a shower, but I’ve got stuff I have to do. Can I drop her down to you?”
“Oh, God . . .” I heard the breath leak out of her. Geri is our optimist: she still hopes, after twenty years of this, that every time will be the last, that one morning Dina will wake up cured. “Ah, God, the poor little thing. I’d love to take her, but not tonight. Maybe in a couple of days, if she’s still—”
“I can’t wait a couple of days, Geri. I’m on a big case, I’m going to be working eighteen-hour shifts for the foreseeable, and it’s not like I can bring her to work with me.”
“Oh, Mick, I can’t. Sheila’s got the stomach flu, that’s what I was telling you, she’s after giving it to her dad—the two of them were up all night getting sick, if it wasn’t one it was the other—and I’d say Colm and Andrea’ll come down with it any minute. I’ve been cleaning up sick and doing washing and boiling 7-Up all day, and it looks like I’ll be doing the same again tonight. I couldn’t manage Dina as well. I couldn’t.”
Dina’s episodes last anywhere between three days and two weeks. I keep some of my annual leave saved up just in case, and O’Kelly doesn’t ask, but that wasn’t going to work this time. I said, “What about Dad? Just for once. Couldn’t he . . . ?”
Geri left the silence there. When I was a kid Dad was straight-backed and lean, given to clean, square-edged statements with no wiggle room: Women may fancy a drinking man, but they’ll never respect him. There’s no bad mood that fresh air and exercise can’t mend. Always pay a debt before it’s due and you’ll never go hungry. He could fix anything, grow anything, cook and clean and iron like a professional when he had to. Mum dying blew him right out of the water. He still lives in the house in Terenure where we grew up. Geri and I take turns calling down to him at the weekends, to clean the bathroom, put seven balanced meals in the freezer and check that the TV and the phone are still working. The kitchen wallpaper is the acid-trip orange swirl that Mum picked out in the seventies; in my room, my schoolbooks are dog-eared and cobwebbed on the bookshelf Dad made for me. Go into the sitting room and ask him a question: after a few seconds he’ll turn from the telly, blink at you, say, “Son. Good to see you,” and go back to watching Australian soap operas with the sound turned down. Occasionally, when he gets restless, he extracts himself from the sofa and shuffles around the back garden a few times, in his slippers.
I said, “Geri, please. It’s only for the night. She’ll sleep all day tomorrow, and I’m hoping I’ll have work sorted out by tomorrow evening. Please.”
“I would if I could, Mick. It’s not that I’m too busy, you know I wouldn’t mind that . . .” The background noise had faded: she had moved away from the kids, for privacy. I pictured her in their dining room strewn with bright jumpers and homework, tugging a strand of blond out of its careful weekly set. We both knew I wouldn’t have suggested our father unless I was desperate. “But you know how she goes if you don’t stay with her every minute, and I’ve Sheila and Phil to look after . . . What would I do if one of them started getting sick in the middle of the night? Just leave them to clean up their own mess? Or leave her and have her start carrying on, wake the house?”
I let my shoulders slump back against the wall and ran a hand over my face. My apartment felt airless, stuffed with the reek of whatever fake-lemon chemicals the cleaner uses. “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”
“Mick. If we can’t cope . . . Maybe we should think about somewhere that can.”
“No,” I said. It came out sharp enough that I flinched, but Dina’s singing didn’t pause. “I can cope. It’ll be fine.”
“Will you be all right? Can you get someone to sub for you?”
“That’s not how it works. I’ll figure something out.”
“Oh, Mick, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. As soon as they’re a bit better—”
“It’s OK. Tell them both I was asking for them, and you try not to catch whatever they’ve got. We’ll talk soon.”
A distant yell of fury, somewhere on Geri’s end. “Andrea! What did I say to you? . . . Sure, Mick, Dina might be better herself by the morning, mightn’t she? You never know your luck.”
“She might, yeah. We’ll hope.” Dina yelped, and the shower shut off: the hot water had run out. “Gotta go,” I said. “Take care,” and I had the phone stashed away and myself neatly arranged in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, by the time the bathroom door opened.
I made myself a beef stir-fry for dinner—Dina wasn’t hungry. The shower had settled her: she curled up on the sofa, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants that she had taken out of my wardrobe, gazing into space and rubbing dreamily at her hair with a towel. “Shh,” she said, when I started to ask delicately about her day. “Don’t talk. Listen. Isn’t it beautiful?”
All I could hear was the muttering of traffic, four floors down, and the synthesized tinkle of the music that the couple upstairs
play every night to send their baby to sleep. I supposed it was peaceful, in its own way, and after a day keeping hold of every thread in that tangle of conversations, it was good to cook and eat in silence. I would have liked to catch the news, to see how the reporters were spinning things, but that was out.
After dinner I brewed coffee, a lot of it. The sound of the beans grinding sent Dina off on a fresh fidget: padding restless barefoot circles around the living room, taking books off my shelves and flipping the pages and putting them back in the wrong places. “Were you supposed to be going out tonight?” she asked, with her back to me. “Like on a date or something?”
“It’s Tuesday. No one goes on dates on Tuesdays.”
“God, Mikey, get some spontaneity. Go out on school nights. Go wild.”
I poured myself a mug of espresso strength and headed for my armchair. “I don’t think I’m the spontaneous type.”
“Well, does that mean you go on dates at the weekends? Like, you’ve got a girlfriend?”
“I don’t think I’ve called anyone my girlfriend since I was twenty. Adults have partners.”
Dina mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, with sound effects. “Middle-aged gay guys in 1995 have partners. Are you going out with anyone? Are you shagging anyone? Are you giving anyone a blast from the yogurt bazooka? Are you—”