by Tana French
“I go, ‘Might be safer to take just the hundred percent, furnish as you go along.’ Jenny laughs—it sounded fake, but that could’ve been just the way the air flattened everything out—and she goes, ‘Oh, Conor, relax. We can afford it. So we won’t eat out as much; there’s nowhere nearby anyway. I want everything to be nice.’
“I go, ‘I’m just saying, it’d be safer. In case.’ Maybe I should’ve said nothing, but that place . . . It felt like a big dog watching you, starting to come closer, and you know right now is when you need to get the fuck out. Pat just laughs and goes, ‘Man, do you know how fast property prices are rising? We haven’t even moved in yet, and the gaff’s already worth more than we’re paying. Any time we decide to sell, we’ll come out with a profit.’”
I said, hearing the pompous note in my voice, “If they were crazy, then so was the rest of the country. Nobody saw the crash coming.”
Conor’s eyebrow flicked. “You think?”
“If anyone had, the country wouldn’t be in this mess.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have a clue about financial stuff. I’m just a web designer. But I knew nobody wanted thousands of houses out in the middle of nowhere. People only bought them because they got told that in five years’ time they could sell up for double what they’d paid, and move somewhere decent. Like I said, I’m just some idiot, but even I knew a pyramid scheme eventually runs out of suckers.”
“Well, look at Alan Greenspan here,” I said. Conor was starting to piss me off—because he had been right, and because Pat and Jenny had had every right to believe that he was wrong. “It’s easy to be right in hindsight, fella. It wouldn’t have killed you to be a little more positive for your friends.”
“You mean, give them a little more bullshit? They were getting plenty of that already. The banks, the developers, the government: Go on, buy, best investment of your lives—”
Richie balled up the sugar sachet and sank it in the bin with a sharp rustle. He said, “If I’d seen my best mates running towards that cliff, I’d’ve said something, too. Might not have stopped them, but it might’ve meant the fall came as less of a shock.”
The two of them were looking at me like they were the ones on the same side, like I was the outsider. Richie was only nudging Conor towards what the crash had done to Pat, but it grated just the same. I said, “Keep talking. What happened next?”
Conor’s jaw moved. The memory was winding him tighter and tighter. “Jenny—she always hated fights—Jenny goes, ‘You should see the size of the back garden! We’re thinking about getting a slide for the kids, and in the summer we’ll have barbecues—you can stay over afterwards, so you won’t have to worry about having a few cans—’ Only just then there’s this huge crash across the road, like a whole bale of slates falling off the top of the scaffolding, something like that. We all jump a mile. When our hearts start beating again, I say, ‘You’re positive about this. Yeah?’ Pat goes, ‘Yeah. We are. We’d better be: the deposit’s non-refundable.’”
Conor shook his head. “He’s trying to make it into a joke. I say, ‘Fuck the deposit. You can still change your minds.’ And Pat, he blows up at me. He yells, ‘Fuck’s sake! Can’t you just pretend to be happy for us?’ And that wasn’t Pat, not at all—like I said, he never lost his temper. So I knew he was having second thoughts, major ones. I go, ‘Do you actually want this gaff? Just tell me that.’
“He goes, ‘Yeah, I do. I always did. You know that. Just because you’re happy renting some bachelor pad for the rest of your life—’ I go, ‘No. Not a gaff. This gaff. Do you want it? Do you even like it? Or are you only buying it because you’re supposed to?’
“Pat goes, ‘So it’s not perfect. I bloody well knew that already. What the fuck do you want us to do? We’ve got kids. When you’ve got a family, you need a home. What’s your problem with that?’”
Conor ran a hand up his jaw, hard enough that it left a red streak. “We were yelling. Back where we grew up, there’d have been half a dozen old ones sticking their noses out the doors by now. Out there, nothing even moved. I go, ‘If you can’t buy something you actually want, then keep renting till you can.’ Pat goes, ‘Sweet Jesus, Conor, that’s not how it works! We need to get on the property ladder!’ I go, ‘Like this? By going a million miles into debt for some dive that might never be a decent place to live? What if the wind changes and you get stuck like that?’
“Jenny tucks her hand in my elbow and she goes, ‘Conor, it’s fine, honest to God it is. I know you’re just trying to look out for us or whatever, but you’re being totally old-fashioned. Everyone’s doing it these days. Everyone.’”
He laughed, a single dry scrape. “She said it like that meant something. Like that was the argument over, end of story. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
Richie said quietly, “She was right. Our generation, how many of them were doing the exact same thing? Thousands, man. Thousands and thousands.”
“So? Who gives a fuck what everyone else does? They were buying a house, not a T-shirt. Not an investment. A home. If you let other people decide what you think about something like that, if you just follow along because it’s trendy, then who are you? When the flock changes direction tomorrow, what, you just throw away everything you think and start over, because other people said so? Then what are you, underneath? You’re nothing. You’re no one.”
That fury, dense and cold as stone. I thought of the kitchen, smashed and bloody. “Is that what you said to Jenny?”
“I couldn’t say anything. Pat—he must’ve seen it on my face—Pat goes, ‘It’s true, man. Ask anyone in the country: ninety-nine percent of them would say we’re doing the right thing.’”
That raw scrape of a laugh again. “Stood there with my mouth open, staring. I couldn’t . . . Pat was never like that. Never. Not when we were sixteen. Yeah, sometimes he’d have a smoke or a spliff just because everyone at the party was, but underneath he knew who he was. He’d never have done anything full-on brain-dead, got into a car where the driver was pissed or anything like that, just because someone tried to pressure him into it. And now here he was, a fucking grown man, bleating on about ‘Everyone else is doing it!’”
I said, “So what did you say?”
Conor shook his head. “There wasn’t anything to say. I knew that already. The two of them . . . I didn’t have a clue who they were, any more. They weren’t people I wanted anything to do with. I tried anyway—fucking eejit. I went, ‘What the fuck’s happened to you two?’
“Pat says, ‘We grew up. That’s what happened. This is what being an adult is like. You play by the rules.’
“I go, ‘No it’s fucking well not. If you’re an adult, you think for your fucking self. Are you insane? Are you a zombie? What are you?’
“We were squared up like we were about to beat the shite out of each other. I thought we were; I thought he was going to punch me, any second. But then Jenny grabs my elbow again and pulls me around, and she yells, ‘You shut up! Just shut up! You’re going to ruin the whole thing. I can’t stand it, all this negativity—I don’t want that anywhere near the kids, I don’t want it anywhere near us, I don’t want it! It’s sick. If everyone starts thinking like you, the whole country’s going to go down the toilet and then we will be in trouble. Then will you be happy?’”
Conor ran a hand over his mouth again; I saw him bite down on the flesh of his palm. “She was crying. I started to say something, I don’t even know what, but Jenny slapped her hands over her ears and walked off, fast, down the road. Pat looked at me like I was dirt. He said, ‘Thanks, man. That was great.’ And he went after her.”
I said, “And what did you do?”
“I walked away. Walked around that shit-hole estate for a couple of hours, looking for something that’d make me ring Pat and say Sorry, man, I was so wrong, this place is gonna be paradise. Al
l I found was more shit hole. In the end I rang this other mate of mine and got him to pick me up. Didn’t hear from them again. Didn’t try to get in touch, either.”
“Hmm,” I said. I leaned back in my chair, tapping my pen off my teeth, and considered that. “I suppose I’ve heard of friendships breaking up over some weird stuff, all right. But property values? Seriously?”
“I turned out to be right, didn’t I?”
“Were you pleased about that?”
“No. I’d have loved to be wrong.”
“Because you cared about Pat. Not to mention Jenny. You cared about Jenny.”
“About all four of them.”
“Especially Jenny. No, hang on: I’m not done. I’m a simple guy, Conor. Ask my partner here, he’ll tell you: I always go for the simplest solution, and it usually turns out to be the right one. So I’m thinking you could have fought with the Spains over their choice of house and the size of their mortgage and what it meant about their worldview and whatever else you just said—I lost track of some of it, you can remind me later. But it’s a lot simpler, given the background, that you guys fought because you were still in love with Jenny Spain.”
“That never even came up. We hadn’t talked about it since that one time, after Fiona broke up with me.”
I said, “So you were still in love with her.”
After a moment Conor said, quietly and painfully, “I’ve never known anyone like her.”
“Which is why your girlfriends never last. Right?”
“I don’t throw years of my life into something I don’t want. No matter who tells me I should. I saw Pat and Jenny; I know what the real thing looks like. Why would I go after anything else?”
I said, “But you’re trying to tell me that’s not what the argument was about.”
A flash of narrow, disgusted gray eyes. “It wasn’t. You think I’d’ve let them guess, either of them?”
“They did before.”
“Because I was younger. I was shite at hiding stuff, back then.”
I laughed out loud. “Just one big open book, yeah? Looks like Pat and Jenny weren’t the only ones who changed when they grew up.”
“I got more sense. I got more control. I didn’t turn into a different person.”
I said, “Does that mean you’re still in love with Jenny?”
“I haven’t talked to her in years.”
Which was a whole different question, but both of them could wait. “Maybe not. But you’ve seen plenty of her, from your little hideout. How did that start, while we’re at it?”
I expected Conor to dodge around that, but he answered fast and easily, like he welcomed it: any subject was better than his feelings for Jenny Spain. “By accident, almost. Things weren’t going great, the end of last year. Work had dried up. It was the start of the crash—no one was saying it, not then, you were a traitor to the country if you noticed it, but I knew. Freelancers like me, we were the first ones that felt it. I was pretty much skint. Had to move out of my apartment, get a shite bedsit—you’ve probably seen it. Haven’t you?”
Neither of us answered—in his corner Richie was staying still and melting into the background, leaving me a clear shot. The corner of Conor’s mouth twisted. “Hope you liked it. You can see why I don’t hang out there if I can help it.”
“But you didn’t sound like you were wild about Ocean View, either. How’d you end up hanging out there?”
He shrugged. “I had time on my hands, I was down . . . I kept thinking about Pat and Jenny. They were who I’d always talked to, if anything was bad. I missed them. I just . . . I wanted to see how they were getting on. I just started wondering.”
I said, “Well, that much I can get. But your average Joe, if he wants to reconnect with old mates, he doesn’t set up camp outside their back window. He picks up the phone. Sorry if it’s a stupid question, old son, but that didn’t occur to you?”
“Didn’t know if they’d want to talk to me. Didn’t even know if we still had enough in common that we’d get on. I couldn’t have taken finding out that we didn’t.” For a second he sounded like a teenager, fragile and raw. “Yeah, I could’ve rung Fiona and asked after them, but I didn’t know how much they’d told her, didn’t want to put her in the middle . . . One weekend I just figured I’d head out to Brianstown, see if I could get a look at them, go home. That was all.”
“And you got your look.”
“Yeah. Went up into that house, where you found me. I was only thinking I might catch them coming out into the back garden or something, but the windows in that kitchen . . . I could see everything. The four of them at the table. Jenny putting an elastic in Emma’s hair so it wouldn’t get in her lunch. Pat telling some story. Jack laughing, food all over his face.”
I asked, “How long did you stay up there?”
“Maybe an hour. It was nice; the nicest thing I’d seen in I don’t know how long.” The memory smoothed the tension out of Conor’s voice, gentled it. “Peaceful. I went home peaceful.”
“So you came back for another fix.”
“Yeah. A couple of weeks later. Emma had her dolls out in the garden, making them take turns to do some dance, showing them how. Jenny was hanging out her washing. Jack was being an airplane.”
“And that was peaceful too. So you kept coming back.”
“Yeah. What else was I going to do all day? Sit in that bedsit, staring at the telly?”
I said, “Next thing you know, you’re all set up with a sleeping bag and a pair of binoculars.”
Conor said, “I know it sounds crazy. You don’t have to tell me.”
“It does. But so far, fella, it also sounds harmless. Where it goes into full-on psycho is where you start breaking into their gaff. Want to tell us your version of that part?”
He still didn’t think twice. Even breaking and entering was safer ground than Jenny. “I found the back door key, like I told you. I wasn’t planning on doing anything with it; I just liked having it. But one morning they were all out, I’d been there all night, I was damp, I was bloody freezing—that was before I got the decent sleeping bag. I thought, Why not, just for five minutes, just to warm up . . . But it was good, in there. It smelled like ironing, and tea and baking, and some kind of flowery thing. Everything was clean, sparkly. It’d been a long time since I’d been in a place like that. A home.”
“When was this?”
“Spring. I don’t remember the date.”
“And then you just kept coming back,” I said. “You’re not much good at resisting temptation, are you, old son?”
“I wasn’t doing any harm.”
“No? So what did you do in there?”
Shrug. Conor had his arms folded and his eyes cut away from us: he was getting embarrassed. “Nothing much. Had a cup of tea and a biscuit. Sometimes a sandwich.” Jenny’s vanishing ham slices. “Sometimes I’d . . .” That flush was rising on his cheeks. “I’d close the curtains in the sitting room, so the arsehole neighbors couldn’t see, and watch a bit of telly. Stuff like that.”
I said, “You were pretending you lived there.”
Conor didn’t answer.
“Ever go upstairs? Into the bedrooms?”
Silence again.
“Conor.”
“A couple of times.”
“What’d you do?”
“Just looked into Emma’s room, and Jack’s. Stood at the door, looked. I just wanted to be able to picture them.”
“And Pat and Jenny’s room? Did you go in there?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Not what you’re thinking. I lay down in their bed—I took off my shoes first. Just for a minute. Closed my eyes. That’s all.”
He wasn’t looking at us. He was falling away into the m
emory; I could feel the sadness rising off him, like cold off ice. I said, sharply, “It didn’t occur to you that you could be scaring the living shite out of the Spains? Or was that a bonus?”
That brought him back. “I wasn’t scaring them. I always made sure I got out of there way before they were due back. Put everything back just like I found it: washed my cup, dried it, put it away. Cleaned the floor, if I’d tracked in dirt. The stuff I took was all tiny; no one’s going to miss a couple of elastic bands. No one would’ve known I’d been there.”
“Except that we did know,” I said. “Keep that in mind. Tell me something, Conor—and remember, no bullshitting. You were jealous as hell, weren’t you? Of the Spains. Of Pat.”
Conor shook his head, an impatient jerk like he was shaking off a fly. “No. You’re not getting it. Same as the stuff when we were eighteen: it wasn’t the way you mean.”
“Then what way was it?”
“I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, ever. I just . . . I know I gave them shit about doing what everyone else did. But when I started watching them . . .”
A long breath. The heating had cut off again. Without its hum the room felt silent as a vacuum; the thin sounds of our breathing were sucked into that silence, dissolved away to nothing. “From the outside their life looked exactly like everyone else’s, something out of some nightmare clone film. But once you saw it from the inside, you saw . . . Like, Jenny used to put on the same idiot fake-tan shite that all the girls use, make herself look exactly like everyone else—but afterwards she’d bring the bottle into the kitchen, and her and the kids would get little paintbrushes and draw on their hands. Stars or smiley faces, or their initials—once she put tiger stripes all up Jack’s arms; he was over the moon, being a tiger all week. Or after the kids were in bed Jenny’d be tidying up their crap, her and every other housewife in the world, only sometimes Pat would come give her a hand and they’d end up playing with the toys—like they’d be having a fight with the stuffed toys, and laughing, and when they got tired they’d lie on the floor together and look out the window at the moon. From up there, you could see they were still them. Still who they were when we were sixteen.”