DERMOT BOLGER
Father’s Music

Dedication

IN MEMORY

Johnny Doherty, travelling fiddle-player

from Donegal,

Seamus Ennis, Ard-Rí of Irish pipers

from Finglas, North Dublin

and

Seosamh Ó hEanaí (Joe Heaney),

Sean-nós singer from Connemara,

County Galway.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

I: London

One

II

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

III: Dublin

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

IV: London

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

V: Donegal

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I LONDON

ONE

MY LOVER LOWERS his headphones over my hair, then enters me. He thrusts stiffly and deep. Irish music swirls into my brain, a bow pressing down across a fiddle, teasing and twisting music from taut strings. My breath comes faster as his hands grip my buttocks, managing to rub his shoulder against the walkman’s volume control. The tune rises, filling me up. I close my eyes so that I can no longer see Luke, just feel his penis arching out and in. The set of reels change and quicken. I listen to a gale blowing across a treeless landscape, see a black huddle of slanted rooftops and drenched cows dreaming of shelter. The beat is inside my head from childhood, imagining an old shoe strike the stone flags and the hush of neighbours gathered in.

Luke pulls my legs higher, positions a pillow under my tensed back. I don’t want to ever open my eyes. The music is so loud and quick it seems sweet torture. It courses through me. I can see his old face playing, that capped man with nicotined teeth and tufts of greying hairs in his nostrils. His eyes are half closed, his breathing laboured. He looks so infirm that he could hardly shuffle across the room, yet his hand flicks the bow back and forth without mercy. He squeezes the wild tune loose, an old master in utter control, coaxing out grace-notes and bending them pitilessly to his will, while the wind howls outside along sheep tracks known only to mountain foxes and to him. He is my peddler father, the wandering lone wolf tinker my mother would never speak of, whose restless soul must now be constrained in some isolated graveyard.

My lover suddenly cries. I know I have drawn blood with my nails against his back. But Luke’s voice is lost beneath the reel spinning faster and faster. And I shout too, no longer caring who hears in that cheap hotel near Edgware Road, with no will left of my own. My voice is just one more note lost in the frenzy of a Donegal gale blowing itself out among the rocks beyond the house where my father once played. Then my scream is suddenly loud, piercing the rush of white noise as the reels halt and I hear my lover come, feeling his final thrusts before I twist the headphones off to look up. The same hairline cracks are on the ceiling. A fly blunders against the damp lampshade, clinging insanely to life in late November.

‘Did you come?’ Luke asks. That’s my own business. I stare back until he looks away.

‘Does your wife like you to fuck her like this? Or is she more the country-and-western kind?’

We lie still after that. Why do I always need to hurt Luke? Is it my way of keeping any threat of tenderness at bay? In four weeks’ time it will be Christmas, with his youngest son waking him before dawn. He gets his store manager to phone the boy from his tile shop every Christmas Eve. Afterwards the child asks, ‘Why does Santa have an Irish accent?’ I am not jealous. I have no wish to make silent phone calls to eavesdrop on their puzzled tones. Luke would bring me somewhere better than this hotel if I asked. But it suits our relationship which started in the tacky Irish Centre across the road, with Luke embarrassed by his family over from Dublin, like overdressed extras in a gangster film, and me fag-hagging there by fluke with a black queen. The only point my mother and Gran seemed united on was that I would never marry an Irishman.

I listen to the Asian family being bed-and-breakfasted by the Council in the next room and think of how the envious bitch of a receptionist gawks at us each Sunday. I arrived early last week. ‘Your friend isn’t here yet,’ she said. ‘He’s not my friend.’ I eyed her coldly, raising my voice. ‘He’s my lover!’

Luke turns towards me, half asleep as always after he comes. Sometimes I claim that he calls me by his wife’s name when he wakes. It frightens him in case he’s doing the same with her. I like it when I can frighten Luke, especially as he scares me so easily. Maybe this edge of fear has held us together for all these weeks, because I know our affair cannot last.

I touch the scar below his left nipple. After all those early fights, this is the only mark on his body. The Canal Wars, he called them. I looked it up once in a book on Irish history. He laughed when I said I couldn’t find it, and spoke of rival gangs of Dublin youths fighting for possession of a canal lock where they could swim among the reeds and rusted prams in their underpants. Luke had been ten, sent out by his big brother Christy to spy on the enemy. A rival gang caught him in a laneway and stripped off his shirt before a ginger haired boy with a deformed hand slashed at Luke’s flesh with a bicycle chain. He came home with blood on his clothes. His mother sat with him in the hospital while the stitches were done. Weeks later an uncle struck him across the face in the street for allowing himself to be caught by anyone.

‘I was never caught again,’ Luke told me once. ‘The best lesson I ever learnt. Fifteen years later I glanced up in the jakes of a pub in Birmingham and recognised that deformed hand. The man grinned sheepishly. “Jaysus, they were great oul days all the same, Mr Duggan.” You couldn’t hate a man who grinned like that. I pulled his jacket over his face so as not to leave scars when I kicked his head in.’

I had liked the way Luke said that, the consideration in his voice. Why bother all those years later, I asked. What could it prove? Luke had shrugged and claimed he’d no choice. It was the least that was expected of him back then. For years Ginger’s fate had hung over him because he always knew he would meet one of the Duggans again. The man would have felt slighted if Luke hadn’t bothered beating him up.

If they met now, Luke claims he wouldn’t touch the man, having escaped from the lure of that family name, but I don’t know if I want to believe him or not. I trace my finger across Luke’s scar. He has had it so long that the stitch marks have faded into his skin. There’s something vaguely delicate about it. His eyes watch me.

‘Why are you always fidgeting with that?’

I close my eyes and see Luke diving from the rotting beams of a Dublin canal lock, his thin, eleven year old body splitting the green water apart. He sinks down, eyes opening in the fading green light. Bottles, reeds and a rusted milk churn. Something catches his ankle and he panics from memory, floundering his way to the surface to spit the oily water out. No boys are left to wage war since the accident. His cheap vest flaps alone under a stone like a flag of surrender.

‘Tell me about the canal again.’

‘No.’

‘Go on, Luke.’

He rises on one elbow. Is he angry or scared?

‘You’re one mad bitch at times,’ he says.

‘Only at times? Go on, tell me about James Kennedy.’

I know he will tell me and he knows that I know. But not for a while yet. The story must be drawn from him. Thirty years later the memory is still raw. Sixteen months ago I watched my mother die in Harrow, but I had been prepared for it, with nurses discreetly waiting in the background and the cleansing scent of disinfectant. Her death had been so prolonged I had grown almost resentful of her. But what must it have been like at eleven to see your best friend drown?

Before then Luke’s brother, Christy, was the gang’s natural leader. But, at twelve, Christy was initiating himself into the stronger currencies of adolescence; the webs of factory skylights, the nods of silent fences, the expanding limits of pubescent girls allowing themselves to be manoeuvred into alleyways. In that vacuum James Kennedy had become the Canal King, the reigning monarch of their childhood who plotted wars and conquests, with Luke happy as his lieutenant.

Somewhere in Luke’s memory it must still be that parched July day, when thirty rival youths were beaten back from the canal lock and James Kennedy’s gang danced on the rotten planks in Y-fronted celebration. They dived repeatedly from the wooden gates, raising a constant spray of foam as dogs shook themselves dry on the tow-path and an old tramp hunched down to watch, sucking on a discarded butt. What madness made Luke dive from so high up on the lock, and what choice had James but to climb even higher? The hush began before James’ body even broken the water, as each boy counted the seconds, waiting for James’ head to re-emerge. Thirteen seconds, fourteen, fifteen. Nobody wanted to admit that something was wrong. Nineteen, twenty, the sudden rush of bodies instinctively diving in.

James was still alive when they gathered around him, his foot caught in the spokes of an old wheel. Lush reeds were twisted round his ankle. Some boys claimed that the reeds were alive, wrapping themselves tightly round James’ shin no matter how often they tried to prise them away. The others were forced to surface for air, while James’ kid brother, Joe, screamed and wet his trousers on the bank. There was only James and Luke left down there, with James’ face turning blue and his eyes curiously calm as if saying; ‘you’re the new king, kiddo, it’s all on your shoulders now’. When the others dived again it was to pull their hands apart and bear Luke up into his new kingdom of barking dogs and sirens under the scorching sun.

Soon Luke will tell me this story again beneath the blankets, his voice cold and emotionless. I’ll feel his penis stiffen and know that afterwards he will turn me on my stomach, his hands merciless as he grasps my hips to drag me back and forth. I will raise my hands to pull the blankets tight, drowning under the blackness we are submerged beneath, as I listen to his hard excited breath and think of how his heart will beat, loud and fast as if scared, in the silence after we have spent.

I open my eyes, surprised that I have slept. I can hear the Asians watching a Star Trek movie. The carpet is threadbare and cold against my feet. I find my tights in the street light coming through the gaps in the blinds, hesitate and then pocket his walkman with the tape. Sean Maguire is the fiddler, he says. I think of Luke in jail that one time in Dublin, slopping out and being ridiculed for listening to bog music like that, with his family name alone protecting him. Luke claims that he has been a legitimate businessman for years now, but he never tells me why he served time and there are things that even I know not to ask.

The hotel room is freezing. I find my skirt and shoes. Luke hates me leaving without waking him. That’s why he has hidden my knickers. He will reach for them beneath the mattress in half an hour’s time, fingering them like some obscure consolation as he imagines me sitting on the swaying tube to Angel, being eyed by black youths in baseball hats. My legs will be crossed as I read the ads for fountain pens and office temps, while in my ears his tape will play like a phantom pain, bringing back all the memories I have never told him about.

The child whom I was once in my grandparents’ house in Harrow seems like a stranger now. By day she would obey her Gran’s clock-work ordinance, but alone at night she would close her eyes to imagine rooftops huddled against a Donegal hillside and neighbours gathering to hear her father play in hamlets and remote glens. I can see her still dancing barefoot, while my mother and Gran argued about her future downstairs. Swaying to tunes she could only imagine and spinning ever faster until, finally, falling on to the bed and gripping the blankets dizzily over her head, she almost believed that his fiddler’s hands were swaying in the shadow of the cherry-blossom branches against her window: my dark father secretly making music for the daughter whose existence he had never bothered to acknowledge.

II

TWO

THAT SUMMER BEFORE I had met Luke it seemed to be raining incessantly almost every Sunday when I woke. Drab light pervaded my bedsit as I lay on until noon, stranded between dreams and wakening, before dragging myself under the shower down the hallway.

Later, as winter came in, I would resent Luke for becoming the focus of my Sundays. Before I met him they never dragged in that way. I had taken a slovenly delight in them, only bothering to cook myself a leisurely dinner and eat it in my dressing gown before the television when daylight was already teetering in the sky. The payphone on the landing rarely rang on Sundays and I made certain it never rang for me. I lived my real life away from that house of cheap flats in Islington and I recognised the other tenants only by the tread of their footsteps past my door.

Since moving into that flat after my mother’s death, Sunday was the evening when, once a month or so, I allowed men to chat me up. I liked Sunday nights for that and I liked to hunt alone. The weekend was effectively over, with men less on the prowl and less in love with themselves and, on Monday morning, if they were lucky enough (few were and fewer deserved to be) I’d enjoy their predicament in trying to manoeuvre me from their beds in time to make a dash for work. Sometimes, with the more nervous types, I’d sleepily turn over, letting them stew with visions of a ransacked flat on their return and messages scrawled in lipstick for neighbours to read. Once or twice I even stayed on alone, wrapping myself in their bath robes and fingering the details of their lives after they had gone.

I always made sure they had somewhere to go, with proper jobs and nice apartments. I preferred my casual lays to be conventional. Accountants who bleated as they came and grinned uncomfortably when asked if their pure wool pullovers were purchased in Harrods or sheared off their backs by their mammies. Bitch, I heard them mutter in their minds. But they were hooked, calculating the odds and afraid to blow it. They’d rush to the bar to buy stronger drinks, hoping to catch their friends’ eyes and be rewarded with a wink.

Sex seemed easier with people I’d nothing in common with. Their dull lives were exotic really. Ordered men swallowed any lie you threw at them. They scampered off when I finally allowed them to, desperate to brag confidentially about the former nun from Bishop’s Stortford or the Leamington Spa zoologist they had picked up. Perhaps I judged some too harshly. A decent one or two probably bothered to phone the number I gave them and were hurt to find themselves speaking to the answering machine at the Battersea Dogs’ Home.

But if I reserved one life for Sundays, it was on Saturdays that I really had my fun back then, with Roxy and Honor. We toured the clubs, trying to stay together as the E took hold and we threw ourselves into the joyous wave of bodies skewed about in the strobe lights and found each other again when we were washed out the other side. Sometimes there were vans that sped for hours along motorways, crammed full of underdressed girls and lank youths with dandruff and socks that could walk home by themselves.

We always had to stop to allow someone to get sick and stood about, arguing with the spaced out driver who swore blind that he wasn’t lost. When we finally arrived, the raves were never as good as the expectations built up on those journeys. We would find ourselves in a field at dawn with damp grass and sheep shite trampled underfoot. There was a manic blankness in people’s eyes as they danced like their movements were a nervous twitch they couldn’t shake off. Even when their eyes closed as if asleep, their legs wouldn’t stop moving. Music pulsed inside them like an orgasm they couldn’t be released from, the pleasure of which paled and pained but continued on. Finally, when legs shuffled to a halt by themselves, a thirst remained like a purgatory which no Christ in no desert ever endured. By the time the local police arrived, the vans that had brought us there were gone. I hated the journeys where they herded us back to London and I’d finally unlock my flat door, too tired to open a window and release the odour of trapped heat and sour milk.

Those burnt out evenings were to be avoided. That was why Roxy and Honor and I fell out from those dance clubs most Saturday nights before the temptations of vague location maps and offers of lifts were passed around. Sometimes, giggling and swaying about the after-hours streets, we would stumble across a gig in some fire-trap basement club. If the band were inexcusably chronic we’d push our way up to the stage, dancing and screaming our adoration at the acne-scarred singer, puffing him up to more ludicrous posing. We’d cluster at his feet, shouting between songs that we would wait outside for him to take all three of us in the one bed later that night. Rather than fight among ourselves we had decided to share his body.

If the bouncers hadn’t already cottoned on to us, we’d point towards the exit and blow kisses at him, before staggering out to laugh and fall against the shop windows, imagining him rushing to finish the gig. We’d play our favourite game of trying to out-stare the mannequins, shrieking over which shop dummy had winked back first. Then we’d order kebabs in some dingy restaurant, taking turns to trip down to the ladies and put our mouths under the tap. We’d sit, trying to cajole a smile from the sullen waitresses. I was happy there, loved by my friends and loving them back. Nothing could ever come between us. My life in Harrow had vanished and my future would have to wait because the present seemed so immaculate.

But eventually, when chairs were being piled onto the formica tables, we were forced on to the streets again. It would be nearly dawn and we’d stumble into Tower Records where serious night owls with horn-rimmed glasses scoured through the back catalogues of Gerry’s Left Testicle or other punk bands from Papua New Guinea. We never lasted long there before we were thrown out. But sometimes, as the first ache of sobriety turned my stomach sour, I’d find myself flicking through the Irish section. The foreign names were unpronounceable, crammed with Os and Macs and crooked accents. I’d stare at the high cheekbones and bony elongated fingers of old pipers on sepia covers. There was even a tiny section reserved for sean-nós singing: a solitary, indecipherable wailing without any musical backing at all.

My mother once told me that my father, Frank Sweeney, sang as well as played the fiddle. He had reined in his wanderlust long enough to witness my birth before deserting us to return to Ireland. That was all I knew. I rarely thought about him or cared if he might still be alive. But sometimes during those raids on Tower Records I was glad that Roxy and Honor were goading a nerd as I searched in vain for what my mother once told me was his favourite tune, Last Night’s Joy. I’d take the earphones from a listening post and select a disc at random. A grainy dawn would have broken with traffic easing off, leaving only black taxis speeding to catch the lights. I’d close my eyes, listening to the ebb of that impenetrable music and think of my mother dying in Northwick Park Hospital a year before. I didn’t know what those tunes meant, each one sounding the same, only faster. Even their names gave no clue: The Frost is All Over, Jenny Picking Cockles, The Pigeon on the Gate.

They should have conjured up images of hillsides of barley shaken by the wind, or hares bounding through the winter dark as boots crunched ice on potholes along a lane. Instead I saw my mother’s face on a hospital pillow and thought of how I had never heard her listen to that music which, Grandad told me, my father had played in the back bedroom. My father’s music and my mother’s pain. Their daughter’s futile regrets after the bird had flown. The music gave way to white static and suddenly it was Bessie Smith I wanted to hear, her pain resonating in the heavy pausing as she sang, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

I should be over her death by now, but too much guilt seemed involved to properly mourn her. I’d listen to the clamour as another reel began, knowing that two hysterical girls were about to grab the headphones and shriek with laughter at what was playing. ‘Now that’s what I call jungle music,’ Honor would mock in her London accent laced with a Jamaican twang. What could I do, except pretend to share their mirth as the guard threw us out and we walked the streets until a taxi was found?

That was how, at six o’clock most Sunday mornings, I’d lean against my bedsit door, knowing the same memories were waiting to entrap me. I would be dejected and hungover, filled with regret for the passing of something I’d never properly known. I’d shut my eyes and see the swings in Cunningham Park in Harrow at dawn that previous August. For once the bowling greens had been without their flock of white-clad pensioners, but a group of teenagers still huddled around a ghetto-blaster, like zombies in a bad B-movie, as I had passed.

I hadn’t even found somewhere private to say goodbye to my mother back then. But there had been no special places for the pair of us, no woodlands where mother and daughter had run through a riot of spring flowers or avenues of autumnal leaves. I hadn’t even the memory of sharing a garden bench with her some summer night when she might have put names on to the scattered map of the stars. Maybe I had blocked such memories out that morning, because her death left a numb sensation. But, throughout her cremation, all I had kept remembering was a swing creaking in Cunningham Park, and my eight year old voice afraid to repeat the questions about whether I’d once had a daddy and where he might be. I could recall pain lining her face as, distractedly, she pushed me higher into the air than it felt safe to go, and the sense of being punished for saying something wrong.

Those swings were broken last August when I had knelt to scatter her ashes on the grass. She had always liked that view sweeping up to the public school on the hill. There was heavy rain forecast. I remember wondering if the teenagers had sat there all night. They finally lifted their heads indifferently to watch me open the urn. What did I expect to happen? That her ashes might dissolve with the dew or there would be a sign she was finally at peace? I felt foolish kneeling there. I rose and looked down. I had no God to pray to and I knew she couldn’t really hear, but inside my head I spoke, if not to her spirit then to the ache she had left behind.

My mother was always crippled with doubt, imprisoned all her life by walls. Not just the walls of Gran’s house from which she fled at twenty-two and to which my presence in her womb had forced her to return, or, later on, the walls of mental hospitals with bright day-rooms and discreet gates. It was the invisible walls of Gran’s ambitions which corralled her in, the tyranny of Gran’s dreams about how our lives should be led. She was their only child and now, with her death, I had been all they had left. But really Gran had abandoned Mammy for me long before she died, almost from the day she arrived home pregnant, in fact. The life they planned for me was plotted in a drawer of gilded photograph frames their own daughter had left blank. Their grandchild in a graduation gown, their grandchild smiling beneath her wedding veil, their great grandchildren playing in the cobbled drive of some house in Gerrards Cross which they had skimped all their lives to pay the deposit on.

Gran would have made careful plans about what to do with Mammy’s ashes, like she made plans for everything. Yet it wasn’t for revenge that I had stolen the urn that morning, but from an obscure desire to set my mother free. I had felt nothing except numb indifference towards Gran when I packed my suitcase as they slept, taking whatever cash I could find, and left without leaving a note.

The first trains would be running soon. I had bent down, wanting to touch the ashes but lacking the courage. I climbed the railings at Hindes Road and jumped. I hadn’t meant to look back, but when I did a dog was sniffing at the ashes, his owner fifty yards away as he cocked his leg. There was nothing I could do. I watched as he pawed them, then bounded away. Tears only came months later. Just then I had only felt a hollow sense of relief as I pushed the urn into a bin. I grabbed my bag and raced down Roxborough Road, towards the airless warmth of an early morning train and towards this bedsit where I had hoped to start a life I could finally call my own.

THREE

WHAT WAS IT THAT made me agree to accompany Honor’s brother, Garth, to that Irish Centre off Edgware Road one Sunday evening in September? I had been his alibi, playing at being a fag-hag as he marauded down from the gay bars of Islington into uncharted territory. Roxy and Honor had rolled four joints before we left and teased him about setting off on mission impossible, claiming that he would never turn the baby-faced singer who was due to croon Irish ballads there. But Garth liked challenges and I liked him so much that I would have agreed to go anywhere.

The Irish Centre was packed when we arrived. We drank sitting at the bar. I watched the singer strut about, awkward in a white shiny suit that was as tight around the bum as a toy sailor’s. The boy wasn’t even cute. He had no technique and little sense of how to deliver a song, except with the wooden voice of an altar boy. I wondered if Garth could really have seen him peering hesitantly through the doorway of an Islington bar as if the entire clientele were about to devour him? But Garth swore that it was the same face which he had spied by chance on a poster advertising Liam Darcy, ‘Drogheda’s Own Singing Sensation’, appearing at the Irish Centre.

There had been some sort of football final across in Dublin that day, relayed on a big screen at the bar. The centre was still packed with women and men mingling together in gaudy team colours. The singer’s face jerked around like a wind-up doll, trained to make eye contact with every corner of the room. Each time he reached us Garth was waiting to catch his gaze and wink. Grannies wandered up to the stage to leave requests for him. One left a present of a heart shaped tart. The singer had become aware of Garth and now avoided our part of the bar. His head would stop rotating just before it reached us, but each time his cheeks reddened slightly as they jerked back.

‘You haven’t a hope, Garth,’ I laughed. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this dive and go to a club or something.’

Garth just laughed back. He was a handsome, well built man. I had already felt the envious glances of several women along the bar.

‘I’m having a ball,’ he replied. ‘Sure the kid was as pale as a ghost before we came in. Now look at his cheeks. Here, grab a beer mat and take a request up to him.’

‘I will not.’

‘Go on,’ Garth teased. ‘The Nolan Sisters. Weren’t they half Irish? Slip up to the stage and tell him Garth wants their old standard, Let’s pull ourselves together.’

I laughed again and began to peel the back off a beer mat. I remembered the envy I had felt for Honor on the first evening when I’d gone back to her flat and seen Garth teasing her while their mother kept putting on more toast for anyone who casually called in. He looked over my shoulder, joining in my laughter as I wrote.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘remember that last song he dedicated to everyone present with a little bit of Irish inside them. You tell him to sing the next one for anyone who fancies another little bit of Irish inside them.’

I was drunk enough to bring it up. When I turned a tall Irishman stood right behind us at the bar. I had noticed him already with a large family group who were growing increasingly rowdy. Often men his age made fools of themselves trying to look young, but from his suit I actually thought he was far older until I looked at his face. He was obviously well known at the bar, to which he had been coming up every twenty minutes to buy another round of drinks. He seemed to pay for everything and yet he stood out from the family gathering as much as Garth and I stood out from the ordinary punters at the counter.

‘Share the joke,’ he said and I stopped laughing.

‘What’s it to you?’ I asked.

‘Maybe I could use a laugh.’

‘Well, it’s private between me and my boy-friend here.’

‘I hope your boy-friend’s boy-friend doesn’t get jealous so.’

Garth stood up. They were shoulder to shoulder, both an inch either side of six foot. If the Irishman was into his forties then he wasn’t irredeemably so. Garth would probably be a match for him alone, but not for his family. I was frightened. I had never liked Irish people anyway, because your upbringing doesn’t go away. But the stand off between them was so subtle that not even those people beside us seemed aware of it.

‘He’s cute,’ the Irishman said and Garth’s eyes flicked briefly towards the stage. ‘And you’re everything an Irish mother would love her son to bring home: black, six foot tall and male.’

Garth continued staring ever so casually into the Irishman’s eyes. There was something boyish about his face, yet also something I didn’t quite trust. His voice was so low I could hardly hear it.

‘I hear he goes walkabout, our little altar boy. He’s a bit of a night bird, inclined to roam about like he doesn’t quite know which way to go. Personally I think it’s those apple tarts he has to take back to his room. I mean could you sleep, never knowing if some granny with no teeth and a black bra was going to jump out from inside one of them?’

‘I’ve never heard nobody sing with that accent before,’ Garth said.

‘It’s pure Drogheda,’ the Irishman said. ‘A class of knacker accent. You know knackers … cream crackers … tinkers? Travellers is the term we’re meant to use now. God looks down when a knacker is born and says: “I ordained that this child be born on the side of the road in a freezing trailer that will be burnt out by the locals before Christmas is over, but just in case he survives I’ll give him a Drogheda accent as well”’.

‘And is he one?’ I nodded towards the singer who had started an embarrassing line dancing routine while the crowd cheered. The Irishman laughed and used the opportunity to place his fingers for a second on my shoulder as if I were a child.

‘They wouldn’t let him through this door if he was,’ he said. ‘If he sneaked in they’d smash the glass he drank from before anyone here would use it. He’s from a wee house in Drogheda.’ He nodded to the barman who had assembled the massive round of drinks, then looked at Garth. ‘Our singer friend always stays at the Irish Club in Eaton Square. There’s an all night coffee shop across from the tube station in Sloane Square. I’ve come across him there at three in the morning. A man passing might do the same himself.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ Garth’s tone was guarded. The barman stood, waiting to be paid.

‘Bring lots of whipped cream.’ The Irishman reached for his wallet. ‘Apple tarts need a little extra something to help them go down.’

He handed a fistful of notes to the barman who began to pass the drinks across. Garth sat back. The Irishman ignored us as he relayed pints and shorts into the willing hands of family members who came forward to help. The table where his family sat was crammed with stacked glasses and crumpled cigarette packets. They were obviously the rump left over from a wedding reception. He rejoined them and bent to say something with his back to us. People laughed and some glanced in our direction. The Irishman didn’t look back but I felt nervous. Nobody talked to total strangers like that. Was he winding us up or setting us up? Garth had turned to the bar, nodding at the barman to fetch us two more drinks.

‘I hope I’m wrong,’ I said quietly, ‘but I get this feeling you’re going to walk out the door and have your head kicked in.’

‘Sweetheart, I have that feeling every morning I go to buy a newspaper,’ Garth replied. ‘I get that feeling so often that I stopped noticing years ago I ever had it. If you’re worried, Tracey, just take your coat and go.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m not leaving you.’

‘I don’t need no babysitting from here on in. The dude seems a bit odd but all right. Still you never can tell.’ Garth tossed a fiver on to the counter. ‘It’s my round, but I’ve got to shake hands with the unemployed.’

The encounter had left me agitated, but it wasn’t just concern about Garth. The man’s words made me feel uneasy about myself. If they knew that my father had been a tinker they wouldn’t use this glass again. I hated them and their half-assed sentimental music. I’d only come for a laugh but it didn’t feel right being here. We were drinking doubles but I got the barman to put an extra vodka into my glass. The Irishman peeled off from his family. I might have been nervous but I wasn’t going to show it when he approached again.

‘Luke is my name,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching you.

‘So?’

‘All evening just watching and sitting there thinking.’

‘Thinking what?’

‘That if pigs could fly.’

He had eyes which demanded you stare back into them. They were salesman’s eyes, I thought, and I wasn’t buying.

‘Pigs can’t,’ I said.

‘If they could,’ he replied, ‘your black friend might get an early tube to Sloane Square and leave you sitting here alone.’

‘What’s it to you if he did?’

‘I’ve been watching ever since you came in. I can’t stop. You hate this place more than I do.’

‘Why are you here then?’

‘Duty, guilt, habit.’ He glanced back. ‘You know yourself, family life is never easy.’

I followed his glance. It was obviously a rare coming together of relations, animated and yet fitting uneasily together.

‘When was the wedding?’

‘Yesterday morning,’ he said. ‘Yesterday evening was the family fight and tonight is the kiss and make up.’

‘Do they ever change their clothes?’

‘That’s tomorrow when they keel over and are carried home,’ he said. ‘To Dublin mainly, although a few have flung themselves as far as Coventry and Birmingham. The blonde girl in the blue outfit, she’s the bride. You’d think she’d feck off on her honeymoon, but there’s no fear of her letting us off the hook. She’s heading back to America on Tuesday, where she’s after getting born again. The first time was because of an accident down a lane off Camden Street. You’d think that second time around she might have got it right.’

The reference to hair wasn’t much of a guide because there seemed hardly a woman in his family not bleached blonde. But the bride stood out, beaming with zest and vitamins. She seemed as incapable of being quiet as she was oblivious to the irritation she caused around her.

‘She’s after getting hitched to some lad from Blackheath she met in Houston and nothing would do her but to be married in London so her new in-laws could meet her old out-laws.’ He laughed at his own joke. ‘I don’t think she informed them in advance that her grandfather Kevin was the biggest thug in the Animal Gang in Dublin.’

There was a family resemblance within some of them. The man who dominated the circle seemed a stockier version of Luke, like a crude police photo-fit. Squeezed into a dress suit, he looked dangerous and comic. He snapped at the bride who went quiet, as if struck. The conversation abated, then resumed as an older woman took her hand. The man who’d ferried most of the drinks passed behind the bride to ruffle her hair, coaxing a smile from her as he made peace all round. He was well into his thirties yet there was something baby-faced about him. As he passed us, heading for the gents, I knew he was another brother. He nodded.

‘All right, Luke?’

‘Hanging in there, Shane.’

He walked on with a glance at me.

‘They’re a surly-looking bunch,’ I sneered, hoping Luke would follow his brother.

‘Unpredictable too.’ He played up the insult. ‘Still you can’t swap your family after the January sales. You only get born with one, you have to love them and get on with it.’

But he showed no interest in rejoining them. I took a sip of vodka and wished Garth would return. I liked to choose my Sunday night men, not the other way round. Yet this Irishman had a come on I’d never encountered before. He seemed almost anxious to sell himself short. I revised his age to thirty eight and tried to decide if he was utterly drunk or sober.

‘Seeing as you love your family don’t let me detain you from them,’ I snorted, hoping to blow him off.

‘Like most families, you’d sooner love them from a distance.’

The way he said it made me laugh. For all his physical strength and expensive clothes, as he smiled wryly he suddenly seemed the most miserable trapped son of a bitch I’d seen in years. He looked like Burt Lancaster staring out in The Birdman of Alcatraz. The thought made me wish I was at home alone, watching some black and white video and drinking cheap wine. The Irishman looked like he wouldn’t mind being anywhere else either. I told him so and he laughed. Garth returned and ignored us. The singer finished a big number. A woman came forward to hand him a rose.

‘You don’t need to stay for your black friend’s sake,’ Luke said. ‘It’s All Ireland Final night and if anyone’s paying him any heed they’re only wondering if his granny was Irish and he fancies playing soccer for us. So, say you wanted, you could pick up your coat and walk out of here.’

‘I’m sure I could, but I don’t. Maybe I fancy the singer too.’

‘You don’t cradle-snatch.’

‘But you do, is it?’ Making men feel old normally worked but he refused to be fazed.

‘This isn’t like me,’ he said. ‘But all evening I’ve wondered what you’d do if I asked you to walk out of here with me.’

His voice was calm. I don’t know where the image came from, but I could imagine him soothing terrified animals in that tone, leading them tamely into an abattoir. I should have told him to get lost, but I didn’t just yet, because something about him intrigued me, although I didn’t like myself for responding to it.

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you just happen to live in some flash apartment around the corner’

‘I live in a boring suburb a long way from here and, besides, my wife wouldn’t fancy three of us in the bed. I’m sorry, I was thinking more along the lines of a cheap hotel.’

It seemed the ultimate black joke. For once a single man was chatting me up by pretending to be married. Maybe Luke was bisexual and hoped to rope Garth into the bargain. How many vodkas had I had? I started laughing out loud and he had to point out his wife before I realised with a curious chill that he was serious.

‘What does she think you’re doing talking to me?’

‘Selling wall tiles,’ Luke said. ‘That’s how I make my living. Should you want wall tiles I’m definitely your man. I said to her, “That girl with the black leather queen owns three dance clubs. I’m going to tout for business. Say what you like about dykes but they always have money to burn”’.

It wasn’t funny, but Christ how I laughed. I could see some women in his family glancing over. I held the gaze of one of them, a tough-looking black haired girl around nineteen, the only female who wasn’t blonde apart from Luke’s wife. She looked away self-consciously and when she looked back I winked. I drained my glass. Garth had another round set up. Luke watched me with that half-smile. I shifted his age to forty one and suddenly wondered what he looked like naked.

‘Why don’t you fuck off before I throw this drink over you,’ I said, deciding I’d had enough of him.

He momentarily fingered a wisp of my hair. ‘That would look much nicer dyed blonde,’ he said. ‘You’re young, you’re lucky, you’ve still got time for the fairytales men tell you. But I’m being straight. I’ve watched all night and I’ve decided I’d give five years of my life for one hour with you. See if you’re big enough for a gamble or still just a little girl. There’s a doorway beside the shops across the road. I can’t leave with you, but wait five minutes and I’ll be there.’

Then he was gone before I’d time to tell him what to do with himself. I tried to pay Garth for the drinks but he shook his head, distracted now, weighing hope against disbelief. I noticed the singer glance towards us, taking in Garth’s bowed head and I knew Garth would be sitting in that cafe. But I’d no idea if the singer had ever been there. There seemed no reason to trust a word Luke said.

I wondered if I had knowingly slept with a married man. There were occasions where signs pointed to conclusions I hadn’t wished to draw. The rotten cheating bastard, I thought, looking at him sitting beside the woman he claimed was his wife, while his family argued above the strains of that country-and-western din. His older brother was locked into a serious argument. But Luke ignored it, as if he’d withdrawn into a world of his own. I knew he was acutely aware of every movement I made.

Those Sunday night men had fed me whatever lies I needed to hear. Was Luke worse for telling the truth? His need seemed raw and uncompromising. Maybe it was the vodkas mixed with the dope and wine in Honor’s flat, but suddenly I found that exciting. Just once, what was to stop me doing something truly illicit, something I knew was wrong? Luke had given me the freedom of a role and now I began to play with it, almost seeing myself as that confident, hard-edged club owner. I stared at the black-haired girl in a predatory fashion. If I had been a man she would have blown me away but I sensed her blush instead, then stare back with sudden cold hatred.

That sobered me. I was tired of these games, I wasn’t going to be manipulated into feeling emotions that weren’t there. It was time to leave if I wanted to get a tube that wasn’t crammed with annoying drunks. That was why I was leaving alone I told myself, anything else was too bizarre. I sensed Luke watching. He was clever as well as manipulative. He knew I would say nothing to his wife which might put Garth in danger. A bar full of drunken Irishmen seemed the perfect place for a queer-bashing.

Yet it was his wife I kept watching. For no reason I hated her. Sitting there, plump and content with permed hair and hick clothes that were aeons out of fashion. She was in her late thirties but dressed like someone entering a glamorous granny contest. If Luke’s family began to swipe each other with switch-blades, she would simply lift her Pimms and chat away, oblivious to them. But my hatred had nothing to do with her personally, I was uneasy around all happily married couples. If I felt I would become like her, I’d have smashed that vodka glass in the ladies and slashed my wrists.

Screw her anyway, I thought. All my life I’d had that future hammered into me, but I wasn’t living by Gran’s rules any more. Why not fuck a married man under his family’s nose? That would be one for Roxy and Honor, although, even in my drunken state, I knew I’d never tell them. If Luke hadn’t attracted me I would never have let him talk for so long. His desire attracted me too, at odds with most men’s surface pretence. I wasn’t bound by vows I’d no intention of ever getting roped into. Besides, for all his talk, he wouldn’t dare. He wanted me here to eyeball. Once I stepped off this stool I would discover him to be all bull-shit, like most men.

I tapped Garth’s shoulder and he patted my arm. I didn’t look back. Eight vodkas or was it nine? Only when I hit the cold air did I count seriously again. The street was silent before closing time. It was three minutes’ walk to the tube. I made a mental note of danger points. But I didn’t go that way. Instead I stood in the doorway beside the shuttered shops and fixed my coat, then unbuttoned it again. One minute passed, maybe two. I was going nowhere with Luke but I was curious to see if he dared appear. If he did, I could slip away into the shadows.

Four minutes passed, I couldn’t believe I was still there. He hadn’t the balls. It was cold. I buttoned my coat again. I found I was excited. How many weeks was it since I’d slept with a man? The air smelt like there would be heavy rain soon. Five minutes turned into six, twice the time it would have taken to walk to the tube. I’d have to hurry now. Luke was just another manipulator, a cheat who ran scared. You could expect no better from the Irish. I remembered Gran repeating the phrase every time there was a bomb on the news. If she saw me now her worst fears would be confirmed, standing like a cheap tart waiting for an Irishman. When would I lose this hatred every time I thought of her, or was hatred a mechanism to keep guilt at bay? In thirteen months I’d never phoned. I should write but what could I say? I had decided to put my past behind me. At that moment I felt removed from everything, consumed by an old ache which I knew neither sex or drink could fill. I felt outside myself, watching this girl who was clearly drunk because she took forever to button her coat. Why had she spent a decade being addicted to crazy notions? I willed myself to move and finally I did so. But I had only walked a dozen paces when I felt Luke take my arm.

‘That’s the problem with you dykes,’ he said quietly. ‘Hard-nosed businesswomen always demanding attention now.’

This was when I stopped pretending. The role-playing, the danger of discovery, everything about this situation made me as horny as hell. It was no big deal for a man to feel this way, so why should I be different? I was glad the hotel was only three doors down. I might have felt cheap in reception, except that it felt too much like a game. The bed hadn’t been made up, but we didn’t get that far. We never even turned the light on. We did it once for Luke, standing up, with sweat on my neck turning cold against the damp wallpaper, and then a second time, more slowly for me, with him sitting on a hard chair. I liked that better, not having to look at him, just rocking back and forth on his knee as I tried to guess at the lives behind curtained windows across the street. I heard muffled calls for an encore at the Irish Centre. Luke withdrew hurriedly before he came and I heard him finish the business with his hand. Even with a condom he was a cautious man. I pulled my dress down between his knees and my buttocks, but it was so soaked with sweat that the sensation remained of naked flesh upon flesh.

Time was against us. They would be clearing the bar in the Irish Centre. But we stayed perfectly still, like children bewitched in a fairytale. There were raised voices below, but the street seemed distant. I heard the condom slip to the floor. Some men often made a joke while others were quiet and tender. Luke did nothing until I felt his cold hands toying with my shoulders.

‘Tell me about wall tiles,’ I said.

‘They’re smooth.’ His hands moved to my neck. ‘You take your time and lay them right until even the joins are smooth. That is unless you make a mistake and they crack.’

There was no force in his hands and nothing in his voice to suggest menace, but I was suddenly scared and he knew it. The room was cheap and my unease made me feel cheap too. Luke must have been crazy to take this risk. How crazy was he and what danger had I placed myself in? I sensed him staring at my neck.

‘Shouldn’t you head back to your flabby wife?’ I wanted to break the spell and control my fear with the insult, but Luke’s voice maintained its methodical calm.

‘It so happens I love her.’

‘Is that meant to be a joke?’

‘No. But it doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy fucking other girls either.’ A hint of apology entered his tone. ‘You’re not just some girl. I don’t do this often. Seven times in twenty two years. That’s faithful enough as marriages go.’

‘That’s my age,’ I said. ‘Twenty two. You must like us young.’

‘I’ve only had one girl younger than you.’

‘Flirting with innocence, were you?’

‘She was the most deadly of the lot.’

I didn’t want a litany. I felt cold and started shivering. Tomorrow I’d wake hungover, trying to convince myself this had never happened. But I’d know that physically it had felt truly good.

‘It didn’t work, you know,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Facing away from me. For all your attempts to hide it, I could still tell both times you came.’

I felt vulnerable and wanted to be out of that room. His fingers retreated from my neck to glide slowly along my backbone. When he lifted them away my inability to track their movements made them more menacing. Luke wasn’t the first Irishman to touch me. I had fooled myself into thinking I could banish such memories.

‘I suppose you’re going to say you love me next,’ I said.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t room to love anyone else. But I loved fucking you.’ Somehow the inflection he invested in the word stripped it of vulgarity. ‘Next Sunday night I can make sure we get this same room. You enjoyed it here, don’t say you didn’t. Think about it, eh?’

‘So much for champagne and flowers,’ I mocked.

‘I haven’t time for that stuff any more and, be honest, you don’t want it either. There’s a fight brewing out there. I’ve got to get down. Next Sunday night, around half past nine.’

‘Bring a copy of Penthouse and a hanky,’ I said. ‘I’d hate to have you going home frustrated.’

‘Half nine,’ Luke repeated. ‘Ten at the latest. I warn you, I won’t wait all night.’

I stood up. My knickers lay a few feet away. I didn’t want to put them on with him watching. But when I bent to pick them up he covered them with his foot.

‘Pirate’s loot,’ he said. ‘Be a good girl and you’ll get them back next week.’

I didn’t argue or tell him what to do with those panties alone by himself here next Sunday and every Sunday until he went blind. I held my tongue, sobering up rapidly. I had broken every rule I ever taught myself for protection against this self-destructive urge. I simply wanted to get safely out that door. Only when I had it open did I glance back. Luke was slumped on that chair with his trousers still bunched around his ankles. Something about him, in the light from the hallway, suggested the sight which must greet night porters who enter hotel rooms to find that a murder has occurred. Then he turned his head.

‘I couldn’t stop looking at you,’ he said, as if amazed to find himself there. ‘You don’t know how desperately I want you to come.’

I ran downstairs, past reception and only stopped when I found myself among the crowds from the Irish Centre. Luke was right, an argument was developing among his family. If his wife saw me leave the hotel she gave no sign, but one or two heads turned when I passed. There was no sign of Garth. The black haired girl stared at me coldly and almost defiantly now. I felt naked as if she had understood Luke’s game all along. She could even be his daughter. I pushed my way through the crowd, sensing her eyes still watching me. I felt a chill beneath my skirt as I ran, watching for danger from the shadows. I didn’t care now what cranks might be on the train. I was just thankful to have got safely away and to know that I would never see Luke again.

FOUR

IT IS JUST BEFORE my sixth birthday. I remember this because my thoughts are about presents as I rush from school among a flock of children. Now, walking with my mother, I’m anxious to get home to where Gran will have lunch ready and ensure that I finish two glasses of milk before being allowed to watch the children’s programmes.

But my mother takes a meandering route as if prolonging our journey. She says nothing to draw me into her brooding world, even when I ask for a story. We reach a footbridge across railway tracks and climb up to look across at wintry back gardens where fluorescent lights shine in kitchens. I tug at her hand, but she waits there. Then the train comes, all noise and slipstream and unwashed roofs of carriages. I’m frightened. I know the train cannot hurt us, thundering beneath our feet. It’s my mother I am scared of or scared for. It’s the way she watches the train. She wants to leave. That much I understand. She wants to leave Harrow and Gran and Grandad Pete and maybe she wants to leave me.

Or worse, perhaps she wants to bring me with her on those speeding carriages, away from my dolls and Grandad Pete’s piggyback to bed, from my shelf of stories and the cherry-blossom petals against my window in springtime. There would only be my mother and I travelling alone, past towns without names, skirting forbidding forests where bears roam. I start crying and finally she looks down. She isn’t like mothers in stories or those my classmates have. It’s Gran I run to when I hurt my knee. Yet even Gran tells me to call her mother. ‘I want to go home,’ I say, ‘I want my Gran.’ I pull at her hand, knowing that if I wait for another train I’ll never see her again.

I woke sweating from that dream, the morning after meeting Luke. After sixteen years, my stomach was queasy and I instinctively checked my knickers, remembering how Gran would change the wet sheets while my mother comforted me and I pretended not to remember what my dream was about. How long was it since I had last dreamt of that? Certainly not since my mother’s death, even among the myriad dreams I’d had about her after moving into the flat. Dreams where her face hovered among the blouses in my wardrobe, or she stared up from the water in the sink when I bent to wash my hair. In each dream her eyes were the same as during the bedside vigils before she died, disappointed and hinting at unfinished business. My mother’s greatest weapons were helplessness and silence. Throughout my childhood, watching her breakdowns re-occur, they had left me feeling perpetually guilty, like I had to compensate for my birth having irrevocably altered her life.

For an hour that morning I stood under the shower, scrubbing at my flesh, but I didn’t feel so much soiled by Luke as by myself. I felt caught between conflicting emotions, repulsed by what had happened, yet reliving the excitement of that hotel. I had been so drunk that the memories now held the same dreamlike quality as standing on that railway bridge with my mother.

I honestly believed I’d never see Luke again, or if I did it would be by chance in a glimpse on some crowded escalator. By then he would just be a vaguely familiar face puzzling me until I remembered and turned away. I had been crazy to allow myself to get so drunk. I said nothing to Roxy and Honor and I knew Garth said little about what happened to him. But Honor claimed he was more withdrawn these days as he came and left at odd hours.

Fragments of Luke’s character kept coming back to me during the following week, details which didn’t fit together so that it seemed I was remembering two distinct personalities. He’d been a shark certainly, but maybe that was the secret of sharks – not surface confidence but how they manoeuvred you into believing you alone had glimpsed the vulnerablity beneath their cocksure demeanour. Used cars, wall tiles or young women, we were all commodities the same techniques could be adapted to procure or sell. If I hadn’t glanced back, leaving the hotel room, I might have convinced myself this was true. But my final picture of Luke was so desolate that what stayed with me most strongly was the sense of an ache within him.

If such pain existed, it was his problem not mine. I stayed in on the following Sunday night, trying to put him out of my mind. I might have felt a grim satisfaction at him waiting in that hotel, but I’d no idea if he would show up. If I had got so drunk, how much further gone must Luke have been to risk such an encounter? There again, was I even sure his family were present? I was certain of nothing, except his first name. He hadn’t bothered to ask mine and there was no way he could trace me. Yet later that evening when the hallway was empty, I lifted the receiver off the pay phone so it couldn’t ring.

But the meal I cooked tasted lousy and there was no life in the rented film. I felt listless, crossing to the bay window to lean against the glass and gaze past the narrow garden at the street. I wondered if he was waiting, still hoping I might come. I didn’t know if I wanted him to be there. I had crept downstairs too often as a teenager to check that the phone was working, after giving my number and trust away, to now feel any qualms about the fake lives I spun for other men.

This was different though. I had made no promises to Luke and it seemed crazy to contemplate such a risk again. But I was stung by an irrational guilt, even though I remembered his fingers toying with my neck. Luke was too old for me and I didn’t mess with married men. I was ashamed of the way I’d looked at his wife. It wasn’t her fault if she embodied Gran’s dreams. But it was her happiness which I had most resented, for reminding me of how empty my life seemed.

I didn’t feel like being alone now, yet I didn’t fancy Roxy and Honor’s wildness either. I didn’t know what I wanted, although I never had and didn’t see why I had to. I had sworn that my life would never be black and white or narrowed down to a single job or man. But, as I stepped back to stare at the reflection of myself and the room in the window, my flat looked so shabby and the life I half-led within it utterly shallow. Was this how I really wanted to live? Hungry for two days every week while waiting for the giro, occasionally waitressing or taking temporary jobs in offices I couldn’t wait to escape from? Was I living for myself or still playing games? I remembered as a child the thrill of independence I had felt every time I disappointed their expectations. When I’d left home there was nowhere I hadn’t planned to visit, a street-wise girl travelling alone with no ties. Thirteen miles in thirteen months was nothing to be proud of. The flat was cold. The rented video fizzled out and now, with a click, began to rewind itself. I decided to return it. I knew it could have waited until tomorrow but it was an excuse to escape from that room.

I kept walking after taking the film back, turning down streets I would normally never take after dark. The pubs were packed with drinkers as rock music blared from upstairs windows. It was almost closing time. Twice I nearly went into a bar and then stopped myself. It wasn’t like me to lack the confidence to venture somewhere alone, but tonight I felt unable to adopt a mask. A taxi passed, braking hard to take the corner. There were shops covered by steel shutters except for an Indian restaurant with no customers. I sensed the waiter eyeing me from the lit doorway. I walked quicker to escape his gaze and turned left, intending to circle back towards my flat. But when I got down the street I found it was a cul-de-sac. The last streetlight was a flickering blue as the bulb spluttered out. There was a walled laneway, dividing the street from the high rise flats beyond it.

I knew I should turn back, but I didn’t want to admit that I was scared. I was half way down the lane when a youth jumped from the wall. He crouched as he landed, twenty feet from me, then leaned against the wall. That old fear came back from when I was eleven, almost paralysing me, but I managed to walk on. I had never found this area violent, but that was because I knew, with almost a local’s instinct, where not to walk. The lane was so narrow I’d have to brush against the youth to get past. He watched me approach, his face betraying nothing. In a few seconds I could be fighting for my life, yet I felt nothing for my would-be attacker. He was as much an anonymous piece of flesh to me as I was to him. At that moment all I felt was anger against myself for being stupid enough to be here. The youth’s fingers were clenched, but I couldn’t decide if they held anything. I could see his teeth as I drew close. It was like encountering a loose dog, not knowing how he would react. I fought against myself so he wouldn’t smell my fear.

I was face to face with him now, not knowing if it was more dangerous to ignore his gaze or stare back. I’d worked the key-ring in my pocket around my knuckle so that when I hit him the keys might rip his cheek. I passed, our jackets briefly touching. I smelt his sour breath and had a sense that I could almost hear his heart. He didn’t move a muscle. Then I was beyond him, one yard, two yards, three, still waiting for his arm to grip my neck, trying to prevent myself shaking and restrain my legs from running. I reached the laneway’s end. The street ahead was empty. At the top I saw people on the main road as the pubs closed. Still I was afraid to look back. I got half way up the street before allowing myself to run. I couldn’t stop the images rushing in on me about what might have happened; the waste ground beyond the wall, a boiler house with its smashed door, the starless triangle of sky I might have glimpsed as my dying vision.

When I reached the main road I kept running, controlling an urge to scream. The youth hadn’t raised a finger. He had passively savoured his power to cause terror. I wasn’t furious with myself now but with him, the sick prick getting his kicks from fear. For eleven years I had run from such memories. Now I almost wanted him to have given me an excuse to rip his flesh with my key-ring. Yet I couldn’t remember his face, though it was only moments since our encounter. It was Luke’s face I kept seeing, Luke whom I resented for distracting my judgement until I was like a tourist, floundering about with every scrap of street sense gone.

There were pages of tile shops in the Yellow Pages. I convinced myself that curiosity made me scan them the following Monday, searching for Irish sounding names. The Irish ghettos around Kilburn seemed an obvious place to start. I made a dozen calls, listening to each voice say ‘Hello?’ before asking if Luke was there. Each one said that no Luke worked there and I hung up disappointed, although if they’d asked me to hold for Luke I would have only waited to hear his voice before putting the phone down. I had nothing to say to him. I just felt that planting a surname and banal workplace on Luke would help diminish him in my mind.

On Tuesday morning I dumped the Yellow Pages in a street bin. I had stood Luke up, yet for the previous two days I’d thought of nothing except him. These were danger signs. If I wasn’t careful this obsession could grow. I phoned an employment agency where I sometimes got office work. They had a temporary position, covering for somebody who was sick in Wilkinson’s pharmaceutical importers near Elephant and Castle.

I’d worked there before and had even turned down a permanent job with them. It was a legacy of childhood afternoons in Grandad Pete’s chemist shop, watching him twist his tongue around complex generic names while filling prescriptions, before retreating to his alcove to read the Daily Star which he binned before going home. By the age of ten I had decided to become a chemist. Grandad even persuaded Gran to cut up one of his white coats for me. In between teaching me intricate names of drugs, he’d staple cardboard boxes together for me to climb into and provide running commentaries of me paddling single-handedly down the Amazon or planting the flag of Harrow and Wealdstone on Jupiter. At home he retreated behind the Evening Standard, an inoffensive man who ventured to the club for two pints every evening and whose occasionally animated voice might wake me on his return before Gran’s tongue dispatched him to bed.

When I started work on the Wednesday, the girls in Wilkinson’s were friendly and we even had a drink after work. But at lunch time and interrupting my journey home on Thursday and Friday, I found myself visiting tile shops and leading the staff on about an order I was hoping to place for the clubs I ran. By Saturday I was an expert on wall tiles. I’d also discovered that tile shop owners were among the drabbest males ever to have been hatched out in the sun.

Saturday night came. I heard Roxy and Honor ring my bell, then wait outside, puzzled by my absence. After they were gone I regretting hiding with the light out. I wasn’t in clubbing mood, but I couldn’t sit brooding by myself. I called at Honor’s flat, though I knew they were gone. Garth was dressing to go out.

‘You’ve missed the girls,’ he said.

‘They called. I pretended I was out. Was that awful?’

Garth grinned. I’d always liked him more than Honor.

‘They’re noisy dames,’ he said. ‘I love Honor as my baby sister but sometimes you need to be in the prime of your health to take her. You want to come for coffee?’

‘But you’ve a date, haven’t you?’

He beckoned towards the door. ‘It’s a late date if he shows at all. These shy young owls are frightened to venture out until the whole wood’s asleep.’

‘Does this owl hoot like a choir boy?’ I teased.

‘If he does it’s his own business.’ Garth was circumspect and I knew I’d intruded into a world he kept private. But I wasn’t being nosy, I had just wanted an affirmation that Luke had told the truth in something.

‘Listen,’ he said, more relaxed as we went down the steps. ‘Everyone comes out some time, but occasionally someone does it ten years too late. Do you know who Colonel Parker managed before he got his hands on Elvis? Dancing chickens. He would place chickens on what was actually a hot stove, switch on the music and those chickens danced all night. I never believed in reincarnation, but our friend Liam is so jumpy that in his last life he had to be a dancing chicken way down South.’

The wine bar Garth picked hadn’t filled up yet. There would be a jazz session later on with serious buffs clicking their dentures to some piano improv. Garth pressed me about when I’d last eaten, then ordered food. When I took my first sip of wine I knew I had to be careful. Once I started drinking I wouldn’t stop.

‘Who is he?’ Garth asked.

‘Who mentioned a man?’

‘Come on, Tracey.’ Garth grinned. ‘I should know the signs.’

‘I’ve only met him once,’ I said, with the wine making me realise how hungry I was. ‘It was exciting, but we were crazy with the risks we took.’

‘Do I know him?’

‘We got our roles wrong in the Irish Centre,’ I said. ‘You should have been my chaperon.’

Garth refilled my glass. ‘He wouldn’t be my type,’ he said. ‘I’ve never liked broody men. They’re dangerous, especially when they’re married.’

‘That’s the problem,’ I replied. ‘He’s not my type either.’

Garth laughed in recognition. I wondered about the other part of his life. It was good to talk to someone. The jazz started after the food arrived. It was hard to decide which was worse.

‘It’s a simple enough cock-up,’ I said. ‘The chef’s obviously playing the piano while the band are locked in the kitchen.’

We finished two bottles of wine, then ventured on to the street where it was raining. Garth waved a taxi down.

‘You take it,’ I told him, ‘you’re the man going places.’

He held the door open for me, then climbed in as well.

‘You’re in a bad way, sister,’ he said. ‘You’ll probably cost me the chance of a mother-in-law in Drogheda but we’re going to find out about this Irishman.’

Liam Darcy was waiting in a bar in Kensington. It was twenty minutes to closing time with a stampede of bodies hugging the counter. He saw me with Garth and looked cornered and scared. He rose.

‘Who’s she? A journalist?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Garth said. ‘Take it easy, Liam.’

‘I won’t take it easy, I …’ He lowered his voice as people looked around. ‘We agreed.’

‘Sit down,’ Garth told him. ‘The world isn’t out to get you and anyway you’re safer being seen in public with the likes of her than with me.’

Liam looked at me. ‘I can be seen with anyone I like,’ he protested. ‘Nobody can say that just because I’m having a drink with some …’

He stopped, flustered, leaving the word unspoken. It was a long time since I’d seen anyone so nervous. He was twenty-five or six but anxiety made him seem like a teenager on a first date. I could imagine a time when his clothes were fashionable. They probably still were in Moldova and Uzbekistan. He was good-looking but not in a way that appealed to me.

‘You’re the least gay looking guy I ever met,’ I lied to put him at ease.

‘Yeah, but those songs are a dead giveaway,’ Garth added.

‘What do you mean?’ Liam was defensive again.

‘They’re so corny and sentimental only a man would fall for them.’

It took Liam a moment to realise Garth was having him on. He looked at us, shamefaced. ‘I almost said “queer”, didn’t I?’

‘I’ve been called worse,’ Garth replied. ‘Names change nothing so take your pick. I’ll get us a drink.’

Garth pushed his way through the crowd. I sat in uneasy silence with Liam until he looked across.

‘You were in the Irish Centre,’ he said. ‘I remember your face. I’ve offended him.’

‘That’s between you and him.’

‘I just panicked. I’m not used to this. I almost didn’t turn up tonight.’

‘He’s a good man, Garth,’ I said.

‘We’re not … I mean we haven’t.’ He looked at me again. ‘Do I really not look gay? For years I’ve tried convincing myself, but you get sick pretending.’

‘Why not come out? In the long run it’s better.’

‘Maybe over here it is,’ he said. ‘But my manager would kill me. Two years ago I worked in Wavin Pipes in Balbriggan. I’d hardly an arse in my trousers. Now five people make a living out of me. I can’t walk away from all that.’

‘Would the Irish papers go crazy?’

‘They’d love it,’ he said. ‘I’d be a hero. But papers don’t count. They only mock my music anyway. I wouldn’t get gigs. The men running this business are fossils who’ll never change.’

I saw Garth joke with the barman as he gathered our drinks up. Liam watched him too.

‘So you live a lie,’ I said.

‘What’s so wrong with that?’ Liam was suddenly angry. ‘People think I’m stupid but I’m not. I know those songs are half-arsed but I like them. I like others, sean-nós, traditional stuff you never heard of, blues, rock, all kinds. Maybe my manager’s stuck me in one box, but I’ll not be stuck straight back in another. The gay country singer. It wouldn’t matter what I’d sing. Every bloody question would be about the same thing. I wouldn’t be a singer, I’d be a token queer bandied about by everyone for their own use.’

‘I’m sorry’, I said. ‘I’m drunk. I wasn’t getting at you.’

Garth put the drinks down and sat back. Liam took a long sip of Jack Daniels and smiled, ruefully.

‘I normally have this conversation with myself,’ he said. ‘My manager says in three years I’ll be as big as any of them: Philomena Begley, Daniel O’Donnell, Big Tom. “Leave everything to me,” he says and I do. He knows the business. He decides when my albums come out, but I’ll decide when I do.’

‘That’s your business,’ Garth said. ‘We’ve more serious things to discuss, like which club to go dancing in.’

It took intense persuading to get Liam to visit a gay club, and he only agreed when Garth repeatedly explained how discreet the one he had chosen was. It was in the taxi that Garth mentioned Luke, asking Liam if he remembered a wedding party in the Irish Centre.

‘The place was packed,’ Liam replied. ‘I play it once a month. I won’t know anyone there.’

‘There’s a guy Tracey wants to know about,’ Garth pressed him. ‘From Dublin but living here. His name is Luke and he works in tiles. He knew you or a fair amount about you.’

I realised Garth had never told Liam how he came to be in that coffee shop and he was taking a risk for me now.

‘What did he claim to know?’ Liam was defensive again.

‘Where I might meet you, for example.’

Liam lowered the window so that cold air filled the cab. The West Indian driver drove with sullen fury, jerking us about. Liam’s good humour had vanished as he digested the news of someone else knowing his movements.

‘And that it might be worth your while going there?’ Liam asked. Garth said nothing, but Liam leaned back, tense now with the world shrinking in his mind.

‘I don’t know anyone called Luke,’ he said eventually.

I recognised the club when we got there. Garth had taken me there once with Roxy and Honor. I always loved gay clubs. They had the best sounds and least hassle and gay men were great dancers around you. The club was packed. At first Liam made it clear that I was with Garth and he was with Jack Daniels. He downed three of them neat. I could imagine him lying awake, perpetually wondering who knew and who didn’t. Now Luke was another name for his list, closer to home than us and therefore more dangerous.

Garth and I danced alone at first and only when Liam was approached by men did we persuade him to join us. He appeared awkward but then, as he relaxed, he took over our part of the floor, slipping into routines which had looked hackneyed in the Irish Centre. Now, though the music was utterly different, they were breath-takingly joyous. Men stopped to watch, infected by his boyish animation. Nobody does Elvis in a gay club, but he did, the younger Elvis, wide-eyed and sexually innocent, before Colonel Parker’s gimmicks killed him off. I remembered Garth’s story and realised that previously I was watching a dancing chicken. Now I saw the man Garth had always guessed at. The music halted and we returned to the bar for more drinks. Liam took a long sip, his hair damp with sweat.

‘You’re wrong about something,’ I said after Garth went to the gents. ‘I do know sean-nós singing.’

Liam looked at me in surprise, struggling to remember his outburst in the pub. ‘What does it sound like?’

I tried to recall the unaccompanied drone of an old man’s voice through a listening post at dawn.

‘Like a sperm-whale clapped out after fucking twenty leagues under the sea.’

Liam laughed, draining his glass. ‘Jaysus, you’re not far off the mark,’ he replied.

‘I’ve only heard it once,’ I confessed. ‘It’s probably an acquired taste, like Jack Daniels.’

‘Only words count in sean-nós,’ Liam said. ‘The voice is an unadorned instrument to get them out. Your friend Luke would know sean-nós singing.’

‘You know who he is?’

‘I saw him talk to you in the Irish Centre,’ Liam replied. ‘He’s been pointed out to me at traditional sessions over here. He drinks by himself, taking everything in, even me, obviously. He wouldn’t be a regular and would only come for the music. I mean he’d have nothing in common with the people you’d meet at a traditional gig.’

‘Isn’t that music popular in Ireland?’ I asked.

‘Yes and no,’ he replied. ‘It won’t die out, but country and western is what’s big in Ireland. Then there’s rock music, U2, Sinead O’Connor, The Cranberries. In Dublin you can’t spit without hitting rock stars chilling out. But traditional music has a world of its own. That’s why Luke stood out. He’s a Duggan, if you know what I mean.’

‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Who are the Duggans?’

A man in a leather jacket asked Liam to dance and he shook his head, watching Garth return. Tomorrow Liam might regret this but now he was drunk and enjoying himself. He wanted to dance again and this time I knew three would be a crowd.

‘Traditional music is like a religion in parts of the West or Kerry or Donegal,’ Liam said. ‘But Luke’s types are generally more into James Last. All those lush strings to drown out the noise of knee-caps being broken. Take my word and keep away. The shagging Duggans.’ He laughed, heading for the throbbing beat of the dance floor. ‘You don’t expect to walk into a session and see someone from the biggest shower of thugs in Dublin tapping his feet to the tunes, now do you?’

FIVE

THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY NIGHT I took the tube across London, staring at faces on the platforms and then at my own face reflected back as the train careered through the bowels of the city. People got on and got off, high-heeled girls chattering, lone men with Sunday supplements, everybody rushing somewhere. I might have stayed on the Circle Line all evening, watching the same stations rush back at me. Anywhere was better than a second Sunday alone in that flat.

At Blackfriars the old woman got on. Temple, Embankment, St James’s Park. Within minutes I knew she was going nowhere and that she could sense I was faking a destination too. The carriage was empty. I felt her staring. I thought she was lonely and wanted to talk, then I realised her eyes were taunting me. ‘I had friends at your age,’ she seemed to say, ‘I’d a family and a purpose.’ Her eyes were bird-bright. She looked like the sort of woman you saw in postcards of Trafalgar Square, with pigeons clouding the air at her shoulders as she tossed broken bread probably soaked with paraquat. I stared back and she held my gaze as if declaring this carriage as her private kingdom.

Even without her eyes taunting me I always knew that eventually I’d get off at Edgware Road. I had simply been delaying the moment, trying to fool myself that I wasn’t returning to where I had waited for Luke a fortnight before. It was three minutes’ walk from the station, but it seemed longer. Ten minutes would bring me to the splendour of Marylebone Road, but here the streets seemed more Arabic than English.

It was a strange location for an Irish Centre, surrounded by the scent of spices and taped muzak from cheap restaurants. A notice in a window promised live belly dancing at weekends. I stared at the few diners through the glass. I stood in the doorway opposite the Irish Centre and watched people come from a meeting upstairs. Some left while others drifted towards the bar where rock music was starting. I wanted the street empty like on that night. I closed my eyes but everything felt different.

Loud voices crossed towards me. I walked on so quickly that I was almost past the hotel when I stopped. The lobby was deserted, the receptionist absent from her desk. A stag’s head protruded above the unlit fireplace, looking like he’d been strangled by cobwebs. The Irish voices were at my shoulder now. I pushed the door open and stepped into the lobby. Voices chattered down a nearby corridor. I had no excuse if the receptionist came back. I just ran and reached the bend of the stairs before hearing footsteps below and a tray of glasses being set down.

I walked up the final steps and down a dim corridor of trapped smells. Any pretence of glamour ended with the carpet on the stairs. These doors hadn’t encountered paint for years. A television blared behind one. I came to what had briefly been our room. There wasn’t a sound within. I knocked. If I heard footsteps I was going to run. I just wanted to see inside, to touch the bed we’d never used, the chair and damp wallpaper. I wanted to lay the ghosts of that night to rest.

Down the corridor I heard footsteps. I panicked and tried the handle. The door opened, surprising me. Luke sat in that same chair, facing the window with his back to me. A walkman was over his head and he was absorbed in whatever was playing. His hands were out of sight on his groin. It’s a dirty tape, I thought, he’s masturbating. I had turned to go when he lifted his hand, which held a small tipped cigar. He took a pull, then slowly released smoke into the air.

Liam Darcy’s description came back: the biggest shower of thugs in Dublin. In the taxi home he had been more expansive, detailing the armed robberies for which the most famous of them, Christy Duggan, had become a national figure, after the IRA showed how easily it was done. When robberies became common in Dublin and security tightened, Christy Duggan had orchestrated bank raids which paralysed isolated country towns. The police could never prove anything despite twenty-four-hour surveillance for two years, but, according to Liam, everything about the Duggans was common knowledge. People even knew when Christy’s gang were making a hit because he would drive up and down outside police headquarters. Libel laws meant his name never appeared in the papers, which referred to him as ‘The Ice-man’.

I wasn’t sure how much of this was the Jack Daniels talking, but Liam had kept us in stitches with the bizarre nicknames by which, he maintained, Dublin criminals were known: the Wise-cracker, the Commandant, the Cellar-man. The aliases had turned them into comic book characters, but now, watching Luke, their names and crimes became flesh and blood. He had no idea I was there. I liked the sense of power that gave me. I could watch or leave. If I were his wife I could plunge a scissors into his neck. His jacket lay on the bed. I could steal his credit cards or car keys. Or, if I had any sense, I could turn and run, leaving the door ajar so that he’d suspect someone had stood there, but would never know whether it was me.

There was a click as the tape ended and Luke stirred. This was the moment to slip away. But I stayed there until he turned, slowly as if sensing someone. He seemed neither surprised nor pleased to see me. If any emotion showed it was a relief he tried to cloak. Perhaps it was my imagination gone wild, but I got the impression that he had half thought he was about to be shot.

‘You’re a week late,’ he said quietly, drawing the headphones down. A woman’s voice, in a language I couldn’t understand, drifted along the corridor. Her closeness might have reassured me, only I found I wasn’t nervous. ‘Still, you’re worth the wait.’

The bed was made up this time. A sink in the corner had a cracked mirror above it. I had shared such a room once, running away with my mother.

‘How did you know I’d come?’

‘I didn’t.’ He watched me closely. ‘Last week I held out some hope, but this week I’d none at all.’

The window pane rattled as a truck passed. There were footsteps on the ceiling and hot-tempered voices.

‘Then what are you doing here?’

Luke rose to put his jacket on, slipped the walkman into the pocket, then shrugged and sat on the bed.

‘Why shouldn’t I be here?’ he said. ‘It’s as good as anywhere else.’

‘What’s wrong with staying at home?’

He scrutinised me and I stared back, feeling this was a contest of wills. ‘That’s complex,’ he said, ‘private.’

‘Poor little you.’ I tried to mask my elation behind mockery, not wanting to admit to myself how much I had hoped he’d be here.

‘We married young,’ Luke said, so openly that my jibe sounded cheap. ‘A shotgun job, a miscarriage and then a child on top of us before we knew who we were. I kept growing and she didn’t. Maybe she’d see it different, but either way there’s not much left in common.’

‘Where does she think you are now?’

‘Stock checking, doing the books. All the things I’ve no time for during the week.’

‘She must think you’re a great provider. The businessman who never stops.’

‘She wants for nothing and I’ll make sure she never does.’ Anger entered his tone. I knew he wouldn’t be ridiculed. In truth I’d simply been buying time.

‘If I hadn’t showed up would you have come next Sunday?’

‘I don’t know.’ Luke looked around. ‘Last week I found I liked it here. I could hear myself think. It holds good memories, this room.’

Everything looked cheap and worn. Television stations blared through the walls on either side of us.

‘Not for many people it doesn’t,’ I said. ‘It’s a kip.’

‘That depends on who you shared it with.’

‘I didn’t come for that,’ I said sharply. There were footsteps on the stairs. I stepped back into the corridor so I could be seen.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Luke said.

‘I’m not frightened of anyone.’

‘We were both very drunk,’ he went on. ‘I’m afraid I don’t even know your name.’

‘I know yours,’ I said. ‘The Duggans are famous.’

He relit his cigar, tipping away dead ash. ‘An anonymous fucking hotel,’ he said, with quiet resignation. ‘You’d think at least here I might be known for myself.’

‘That’s the problem with infidelity, things always come out.’ My defensive mockery was replaced by a relaxed teasing. ‘All your family are the same, I hear. Cut-throats, with more nicknames than convictions.’

‘We specialise in the white slave trade,’ he replied, straight-faced.

‘Drugged virgins shipped off in crates of wall tiles.’

‘You’re in luck,’ he said. ‘There’s an EC moratorium on virgins so we’re branching into more experienced types.’

His assertiveness was gone, but a sardonic watchfulness remained. I was surprised by how attracted I felt to him as we toyed with each other. It felt like foreplay, except that I was never going to enter the room. Even when he smiled I sensed his sombreness. The image of him dead in that chair had a prophetic feel. I wondered if I had been an assassin would Luke have greeted me with the same resigned shrug? Yet he gave no impression of being anything other than a small-time businessman. He even seemed to delight in shrinking his world down to two stores in rundown London suburbs. I remembered how he stood out from his family that first time we’d met.

‘I want to show you something,’ he said.

‘What?’

He arose without replying. We walked downstairs. The receptionist was the same age as myself. She lifted her gaze from a magazine to scrutinise us, trying to make Luke feel older.

‘She’s my daughter,’ Luke said, deadpan, returning the key. ‘I can never deflate those dolls by myself.’

We reached the street before starting to laugh. Inside his car I asked him to play the tape he had been listening to.

‘You won’t like it,’ he said.

‘Try me.’

It was Irish fiddle music from somewhere called Sliabh Luachra, recorded live with bodies moving about and background coughing. Luke had taped it off an Irish radio programme.

‘What do the names mean?’ I asked. ‘The Rambling Pitchfork or Boil the Breakfast. They don’t make sense.’

He glanced across, surprised at my knowledge. ‘Why should they? Names aren’t important. A tune might start in one county and if a travelling fiddler liked it, he’d carry it home with a different name. Only the notes counts.’

‘Why do they all sound the same?’

‘They don’t,’ Luke said. ‘Listen.’ He spoke quietly, showing where each tune slipped effortlessly into the next reel in the set. His enthusiasm made him seem boyish. Yet his suit gave the impression of someone impersonating a Bulgarian trade diplomat. I told him so and he laughed, claiming most people never saw beyond an expensive suit. It was a good way to remain invisible.

‘Why do you want to be invisible?’.

‘I’m a private man,’ he said.

‘Enjoying your secrets.’

‘Contradictions,’ he replied. ‘Secrets are dangerous, they self-destruct. Contradictions are different. We’re born under the sign of contradiction. Without them we’d still live in the trees.’

‘Which am I?’

He looked across and raised the tape. ‘You’re a bonus,’ he said.

‘Luke, you’re full of shit.’ I laughed and he joined in, savouring the joke against himself. I didn’t want to talk anymore, I wanted to hear that music. Previously I’d only ever heard snatches, but now it filled me with curious elation. It was seductive. I wondered at how my father’s playing had once lured my mother to swap Harrow for the wilderness of Donegal.

I almost told Luke about my father, then remembered his remarks about travellers. I felt a flush of shame not even Gran might have fully understood. For her the problem with my father had been a matter of class, but with Luke it was a matter of caste. Suddenly I felt like an untouchable, an Irish tinker’s child.

‘You’re quiet,’ Luke said, watching me. I wanted to strip away that expensive suit and drag him down a peg.

‘Your type don’t normally like this music.’

‘Who are my type?’ he replied coolly.

‘People from the slums of Dublin.’

‘I was born in no slum,’ he said. ‘Is that what you’re after? A bit of rough trade, some peasant Paddy to fuck?’

He seemed about to stop the car, then changed gear and put his foot down.

‘I didn’t mean to insult …’

‘You did,’ he said, taking a corner at speed before slowing down, his voice more controlled. ‘People put you in your box and never let you out. That’s why I left Ireland.’

‘Is London any freer?’

‘It’s different at least. You’re just another thick Mick to be patronised.’

The tape ended. He turned it over. There was a hiss before music filled the car again.

‘What are you after?’ Luke said.

‘I don’t know. I wanted to see who you were. I’m not some … I’m not a tart.’

‘I know.’

I stared at the passing streets. It might have been better if he had stopped the car and let me out. This evening we were sober and aware of the void between us.

‘What are you looking for?’ I turned the tables.

‘I don’t know either.’ I felt he was being painfully honest. ‘Every morning I brush my teeth but the staleness won’t go. I get on with life but it’s not me in this suit. I’ve made myself numb so as not to feel this ache.’

‘Why don’t you leave?’

‘Running away solves nothing,’ he said. ‘It still leaves tomorrow to face.’

‘Is your brother a master criminal?’ I asked.

‘The Ice-Man?’ Luke laughed. ‘That sells papers but Christy can hardly tie his shoe-laces. He’s no saint, but if he’s a gang lord why hasn’t he two shillings to rub together? I’m not defending him, but he’s your ordinary decent small-time crook. Nobody in the crime world takes him seriously, but he’s got a big mouth and papers like that. Two of our uncles were famous hard men. A family is like an area, once it gets a reputation the truth doesn’t matter. Real criminals keep their heads down, they like it that way. And they’re only trotting behind the the big scams in fraud by accountants. But that’s not sexy enough, newspapers need bogeymen with half-arsed nicknames.’

He was quiet as a new tune began. ‘The Blackbird,’ he said. ‘Listen, it’s my favourite set dance.’

I was happy not to talk. We’d reached an equilibrium, a wary trust that was as far as we were willing to commit. I closed my eyes, immersed in that lilting tune. It suited the night we drove through, these deserted streets which, in a few hours, would be thronged with every race. We were strangers, separately caught up in the music and wild applause and stamping boots when it finished. Another tune began, with a frighteningly raw sense of abandonment. It was the first time I’d ever felt high on music alone. When I glanced at Luke I felt his sense of isolation.

‘Do your children like this music?’ I asked.

‘It’s not their fault,’ he said. ‘Basically by now they’re English. They’d say they’re Irish and their pals call them Irish, but in Dublin they’re seen as English and rightly so.’

‘I’m English,’ I said, ‘and I like it.’

‘But you’re not running away from it.’

‘How old are they?’

‘I’ve a lad of four,’ he said. ‘The other two are older, almost your age if you must know.’

‘What are they like?’

‘Let’s say it was different when they were younger.’

‘What’s your wife’s name?’

‘Just stop it right fucking there.’ Luke pressed the eject button and the tape slid out, filling the car with static. ‘Two weeks ago I wanted a ride, not a social worker.’

I stared away, hurt. But maybe it was all he had wanted and all I’d wanted too, or allowed myself to want. Was I not just trying to ease my conscience now? Questions wouldn’t change the fact that I’d screwed a married man. We had been a diversion from stale lives. Because that’s what my life was, hysterical laughter in clubs only hid its hollowness. I wanted something more, but not a steady job or boy-friend. I wanted excitement. I wanted Luke’s brother to be ‘The Ice-man’. I wanted to fuck whoever I wanted, with me deciding what was right or wrong.

Luke seemed tense as he parked at a row of shops. No one was about and I grew nervous. Last week I had fled from a youth in a lane, vowing never to walk myself into trouble again. Luke got out, producing keys as he bent to pull a steel shutter up. The shop was called AAAssorted Tiles.

‘Do you want marks for spelling and originality?’ I asked.

He turned off the alarm and opened the glass door.

‘It’s first in the Yellow Pages,’ he said, ‘should you care to look.’

Once inside he pulled the shutter partly down and switched on one set of lights so that half the store lay in shadow. I walked along the display units, fingering tiles and listening to him list the countries they were from. There was something soothing in his tone. There was a beautiful jade tile from India on a shelf. I pocketed it.

‘That’s stealing,’ he said.

‘You can’t talk.’

Luke smiled, remembering the panties. He walked to the counter and switched the light off. I gripped the tile, wary now. But he just opened the glass door and pulled the shutter up so I could see him clearly in the street light. He turned.

‘What you see is what you get,’ he said.

‘No Godfather, no master criminal.’

‘We don’t pick our families,’ Luke replied. ‘We can’t give them back either. But we can make lives away from them. Who are your family?’

‘I don’t have one,’ I said.

He stared at my face, as though trying to make me reveal more.

‘Everyone has one. In the end that’s all we have.’

‘My parents are dead,’ I said.

‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘Tracey.’

‘What you see, Tracey, is what you get. I’m hiding nothing or making no promises I can’t keep. But I swear I’ll never lie to you. Monday to Saturday I work here for my family. Sunday is my own. Next Sunday I can arrange to get that room. I can’t arrange for you to be there. I’ll leave you at a tube station now. Don’t give me an answer. I just want you to know that I’ll be waiting should you decide to come.’

SIX

THE BEST WAY TO HIDE something, according to Luke, was to lay yourself so open that people forgot there was anything to hide. Enter any bar in overalls at closing time and you could walk off with the television, the slot machine or the very seats people sat on. The one place where people never saw things happen was under their noses.

That’s why I was wrong at fourteen to hide those initial cuts on my arms. Nobody might have noticed or I could have passed them off as an accident at school. If they hadn’t congealed into a secret, the habit might have lapsed and I would never have grown addicted to the sense of control it gave.

Control was something I’d never known in that house. Even Grandad Pete acquiesced to Gran without comment. Only my mother argued and, even then, half-heartedly, knowing she would be brow-beaten. Nothing could deflect Gran from her second chance to rear a success. At sixteen I was to pass my GCSEs and get into Saint David’s, the best sixth-form in Harrow. National Savings Certs were waiting to be cashed two years after that, when I would enter university, with every penny calculated so that nothing might distract me from my studies there. When Gran asked would I like to study science it wasn’t a question. I had the brains and it was where I might meet a successful prospective husband.

When mother argued that my teachers at Hillside High said I had a gift for English, Gran scoffed at the notion of an Arts degree. That was a catch-all for unambitious people with fuzzy brains and, besides, what would my mother know, having barely scraped through North London Poly before getting herself pregnant. It was a barb used to end all arguments. Mother retreated into silence like a beaten dog and I bent over my homework as if French verbs and equations were a precise world I could lose myself within.

I sometimes wondered about what life my mother might have led if I hadn’t been born, although, even then, I understood that it would never have been a stable one. She was too insecure, rearranging the most simple things until they fell apart in her hands. My father would probably have abandoned her anyway, but without the burden of me, she might have found a niche with someone decent who would lend her confidence. She had become attached to fellow patients in hospital, but whenever she was discharged Gran severed the contact, claiming my mother’s manic depression couldn’t be cured if she was perpetually reminded of it.

Occasionally I saw flushes of devil-may-care mischief in her: out shopping she might drag me into the pictures when we were due home. She’d take my hand and I’d glance at her face, wondering at what life might be like if she could break free of Gran. Only twice had she tried to do so: hitch-hiking around Ireland the summer before I was born and then plotting that disastrous holiday when I was eleven, during which she was blamed for losing me. I never talked about what happened on that trip and they learned not to question me, but for years those memories were still raw, if dormant, for us all.

Even without such tension, fourteen would never have been an easy age. It was a time of half-knowing everything, of self-consciousness, self-questioning and self-hatred. I nicknamed myself Burst Rubber, thrilling in its obscenity. I couldn’t stop visualising my own conception, from blue videos seen in friends’ houses and the magazines Joan Pitman’s brother had, which we found and shrieked with laughter at. There were no faces in the images in my mind, just two torsos – one white-bellied, the other shrouded with greying hair – and the sweating threadbare leather of a car in some Irish bog. The image kept recurring, even in school, a stumpy unwashed penis jutting in and out as the rubber snaps and gathers at the base among ancient curls. Still they rut on, oblivious to my fate passing between them, a fugitive seed meant to have been flung into a ditch, a tadpole struggling upstream to blight that white-bellied Englishwoman’s life.

I knew this was a self-loathing fantasy. Frank Sweeney had married my mother in Dublin, so presumably they once imagined some sort of life together. He had even briefly stayed in Harrow. But there was a collective amnesia about any mention of him.

That year I smoked every day after school with the girls in Cunningham Park as we eyed the lads who passed from the swings. Four of us drank a stolen bottle of vodka and myself and a girl called Clare Ashworth vomited into somebody’s garden on Devonshire Road. We drank cider in Headstone Cemetery with rough boys from Burnt Oak and Clare and I competed to see who could snog with them the longest in public. We dared each other to steal things we didn’t want from shops across from Harrow-on-the-Hill station. We skipped school to party, with curtains drawn and a red bulb in Clare’s living room when her parents were at work. Once we ran off in our skimpiest clothes to keep a vigil on a frozen night outside the recording studio where our favourite band was incorrectly rumoured to be and Clare took me home when I became hysterical for no apparent reason as we camped down in the graffiti-covered wall laneway.

One Saturday we had our noses pierced against our parents’ consent. On the train home we loudly pretended that our clitoris had been pierced, to embarrass the blushing geek who sat with his legs crossed in the next seat. After he left, we wondered more quietly if it really caused climaxes to last an extra twenty seconds, like Joan Pitman’s big sister said, or was she just a cow making it up. Afterwards I walked home with Clare. With the others gone we could stop pretending we weren’t scared. I kept a bandage over my nose all evening until Gran grew suspicious. When she pulled it off I broke down in tears.

Outside of home there was no public rebellion I couldn’t shame her with, but once inside the front door I was shrunk into being a child again as Gran railed against me wanting to rip my jeans or have my hair cropped. She controlled my appearance as carefully as every other aspect of my life. I was afraid to ask about any secrets they kept from me, and ashamed, in turn, to tell them the secrets which I had buried inside me.

Gran’s shame about my origins was bred into me. I told friends I had no idea who my father was. If they pressed, I said that all my mother remembered was that he was strong, white and French – or at least the wine he’d plied her with had been. In truth, all I possessed was his name on my birth certificate and all I knew for certain was that my cauled head and first cries had splintered their unlikely marriage apart. Sweeney had been fifty-nine when he met my mother who was twenty-two. He had abandoned us like Gran always claimed he would, within months of coming to Harrow. Callous, ignorant and selfish, he had been a man who would sooner play music then wash himself. A man who walked away at the first hint of responsibility, leaving his tainted blood coursing through my veins like an infection to be constantly watched.

In my mind I become fourteen again on that sleepless night when the addiction began. I have lain awake for hours, listening to droning voices argue about me downstairs, until I hear my mother’s defeated tread and her door close. I feel I can smell cigarette smoke in her room, the first of the dozen butts to be crumpled like spent cartridges in her bedside ashtray by dawn in her one act of defiance. Soon Gran will come up and check for the reassuring flash of the smoke alarm on the landing.

I am marooned by insomnia, almost physically feeling my body curve into new, unwanted shapes. Everything feels strange, except the sense of being a pawn between them. The house settles down with each of us awake, reliving the latest fight over my behaviour. They cannot understand this change. For years my reports were excellent, the perfect bright pupil, frighteningly articulate when not quiet as a doll in class. Now I know Gran is suggesting another school, still convinced that my behaviour is caused by bad influences. Nothing will be said but I’ll count the butts by my mother’s bedside and know that Gran won.

The radiator contracts with a sullen metallic groan. I am terrified the curtains are not closed properly and I’ll wake to find the moon’s face prying in on me. I hate myself for such a stupid fear, but even thinking about the moon brings those memories back. I play the game where it happened to someone else, but that doesn’t work. I can remember too much, the slanting church roof, the stink of his flesh. I’m a cow for allowing these memories back. My nails dig into my palms. My skin crawls with pent-up tension. Tomorrow my period is due, an unwanted novelty that has worn thin. I turn over, pressing my head into the pillow. My scream is so loud in my mind that I think they will hear. I breathe in the suffocating darkness of the pillow and lift my hands above my head but when I bring them down it is not the roots of my hair they tug at. I know whose hair it is. I have stared at her curls in the photograph on the sitting room wall. That 1960s schoolgirl smiling under her blue beret, surrounded by classmates who’ve swapped hippy beads for overweight husbands in Northwood and Kensington.

I want to scream that I am not my mother, but I cannot feel any sense of myself. I lie like a crumpled puppet, choked by everyone’s need for a second chance. I have felt disembodied once before, after taking pills Clare had found. But the way my body rocks in the bed is more frightening. I twist my head, desperate for comfort, and screw my eyes shut. Other eyes, huge and unblinking, watch from the blurred after-image invading the darkness beyond my eyes: the eyes of the Man in the Moon. They change to those of a fly, triangular legs and twitching limbs tussled in a spider’s web. I’m going mad, like my mother. I want to cry for help like a child. But I am fourteen, with buds of breasts and the downiest of hair and the weight of expectations like a skin hardening over mine.

There is a shard of pain as some hair comes loose. I grimace and let go, my knuckles intertwining above my head, fingers clawing against fingers. A fragment of fingernail peels away. It just happens with a sharp incision of pain. I gasp. The nail hangs, jagged and half broken off. I press it across my wrist and squeeze my face into the pillow, too shocked to feel pain or cry out. What I feel is a flush of revenge. I am damaged goods if I could only tell them. Now I am soiling this replica schoolgirl they’ve tried to create. But suddenly it hurt and aches more as I keep scratching till my arm is a mass of scars.

Then, just as suddenly, it hurts less, as if an amphetamine was unleashed into my bloodstream. The sensation is of giddy exhilaration. If my body is theirs to move about, then these scars are my graffiti scrawled on it. It is no longer myself I’m hurting, but their possession. Without warning, the elixir fades and the brief, startling high is gone. Only a throbbing pain is left, another bewildering layer of guilt, and a fear of discovery which makes me dress next morning with the door locked. I don’t know what I have done or why. I’m frightened of what Gran will do if the scars are discovered. I cannot eat with worry. I clench my sleeve under the table before cycling off, waving with my undamaged hand like the dutiful schoolgirl they all long for.

Now I am twenty-two again and Luke is fucking me. It is the fourth of October, the first of those Sunday evenings we will spend in that hotel. The bedspread is ancient and frayed. It grates against my breasts as I press my face into the pillow. He grips my hips, raising them to meet his thrusts. I can’t understand why, since he started touching me, I keep vividly recalling being fourteen again. But the years in between keep disappearing. I feel I’m back in my childhood bedroom. I raise my hands above my head and seem about to stab at my neck before Luke grabs my wrists and pins them down. I am grateful he is withdrawn into his own silent world. I pull my hands free and intertwine the fingers, protecting my neck from him or myself. Luke is suddenly still, watching in the light from the window, with not even his cock moving inside me.

Perhaps he wants to prolong it, anxious not to come too soon. But I feel he can sense this malaise within me. He appears to wait for permission to continue. The pillow is wet. What a kip, I think, even with damp bedclothes. Then I realise I’m crying. I thrust my hips backwards, I want Luke to move, I want to break the spell of uninvited memories. Luke stirs and I try to focus on his hands or cock. But it’s like an outer layer of skin has been split open and I am shocked to find my younger self preserved within. I feel robbed of the person I’ve carefully become and stripped more naked than I ever wish to be again.

These blocked out memories have been swamping me ever since Luke pulled my sweater over my head while undressing me. It is something I have never let any man do before. It reeked too much of being somebody’s plaything and was too intimate to be allowed, just like I never permitted some men to kiss my lips. But tonight with Luke it seemed less an act of possession than of boyish wonder.

Tonight he seems less sure of himself, as if surprised at my arrival. There has been bad news, he says, but it doesn’t involve him. We are like strangers with little to say, initially as awkward as adolescents. The pretence remains that we are purely here for sex, even if we each suspect there is more to it than that, but are uncertain of what it may be.

There is no sense that we have ever made love before as Luke undresses me. The room is freezing, but he takes his time, starting with my shoes and slowly removing my jeans. I raise my hips, lying back to help and then lean forward, returning his silent smile as I lift my arms to allow him to pull my woollen sweater up. For a second it covers my eyes and, unbidden, the first memory comes. My breath grows faster. I cannot even scream. Luke stops, with the sweater half over my head, disturbed by this sudden tensing of my body.

‘What’s wrong?’ he says.

‘Pull the bloody jumper off!’

He does so and I shake my hair free, lying back on the eiderdown with my eyes tightly shut. Luke pauses, unsure of what is happening. Then he begins unbuttoning my blouse. I feel his fingers but am only half aware of them. The memories are so vivid that if I open my eyes I feel I will be back in Gran’s kitchen.

I feel my school polo-neck being yanked over my face again so that I’m momentarily blinded. I think I’m suffocating as Mammy holds me down and Gran draws my scarred arms from the sleeves. The kitchen blinds are closed against prying eyes. My flesh is goosepimpled. I feel violated, struggling to extract my head from the polo-neck as Gran fingers the scars. I jerk free from my mother and half fall with the polo-neck caught around my throat. I can’t breathe, I’m going to choke. Mammy senses my panic and panics herself, tugging at the twisted garment as Gran shouts at her to pull it off. It comes free and I close my eyes against the questions they keep repeating.

Did a boy inflict these scars? Why had I kept them hidden? Had a man done anything, a neighbour or a teacher who’d warned me against speaking? Was I in trouble? I sense Gran’s fear in this euphemism, her terror of a cycle repeating. Neither of them understand what I need to tell them. I hate them for that as much as I hate myself. A new voice at my ear, a monkey with no face, whispers that I should punish them too.

For three weeks I’ve hidden these bruised arms away, skipping school to avoid swimming and locking the bathroom when I washed. At night I’ve only half slept, promising myself I would leave my arms untouched, even counting the hours I managed to stay this itch. But always I know that at some stage the scratching and biting will begin again. Nothing prevents it, silent pacing or meaningless prayers. Behind the radiator I keep a shattered plastic ruler. This ache only stops when I use it to draw blood and creep downstairs for watered whisky to ease the pain. A map of purple bruising stretches up to my shoulders. The addiction feeds on the fear of discovery. Twice I’ve dreamt my mother has found me in pain and taken me in her arms. Twice I’ve woken disappointed to fret about hiding the flecks of blood where my arm rested on the pillow.

But now, as they stare at my arms in the kitchen, I am suddenly defiant. They are scared of me for the first time in my life. I have stepped beyond their control. The discovery gives me strength. I sit with half my school uniform torn off. I know I cannot explain these scars but now I don’t want to. I hate Mammy for being weak and I’m ashamed of her illness. I hate Gran because I need someone to blame and because no matter how hard I try I can never achieve her dreams heaped on my shoulders.

Even as a baby they had forced me to choose, playing a game where they called from different sides of the playground to see who I’d run to. I remember tottering back and forth until I sat down crying with my arms over my head. Now I stare at their faces, then arch my fingers to scratch my neck with nails I have let grow jagged. I don’t notice whose hand grabs my arm. I call out with what sounds like a shriek of pain but is a cry of freedom.

My cry echoes in this hotel room. I open my eyes, surprised by the sound, like someone waking up. Luke has entered me. He stops, his scared eyes looking into mine.

‘What’s wrong?’ he says. ‘Have I hurt you?’

‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ I say. ‘I didn’t ask you to stop.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Last week you said you just wanted a fuck,’ I tell him. ‘This is private. My life is none of your concern.’

I close my eyes, feeling Luke hesitate, then enter me, deep and deeper. Once these memories start they will not stop. I even know the sequence they will follow: the rows as Gran forcibly cut my nails, the dark games where the closer they examined my body the more secretively I hid my scars. Then the doctors and specialists, hours of queueing for professional voices to probe why I was asking for help. The ink dots and idiotic tests, folders crammed with pictures of the moon which I sullenly drew in their offices. And the suspicion that fell about our house, the rumours I could set into motion, making my grandparents live in fear until I controlled their lives for the next three years. Yet, even at the summit of that power, I still lacked courage to speak about the man in the moon and nothing could touch the core of pain within me.

That pain should be banished, now because I am twenty-two, a new person with a new life. I open my eyes. I’m in a hotel bedroom, being fucked – like my mother at that age – by an Irishman. I don’t know why the memories have returned, or why my mother seems close, as if watching now. But when I close my eyes an adolescent image returns: dark bogland and sweating leather, grey hairs around a penis jutting out and in. I stretch my arms out, wanting to be held. Can they not see what’s happening before their eyes? Can they not even try to understand?

But Luke doesn’t understand. I feel him withdraw and his arms turn me over. The bedspread is ancient and frayed. It grates against my breasts. He grips my hips, raising them to meet his thrusts. I press my face into the pillow and the ache is as insatiable as it always was, and the gulf between me and the world is like a scar that can be hidden but never healed.

SEVEN

FOR THE FOLLOWING nine Sundays I made that journey. I saw less and less of Honor and Roxy, despite only being with Luke once a week. But, although I resented him for it, that time had become increasingly central to my life. The job in Wilkinson’s finished in late October and I was on social security again. I hated the dark evenings, the rain keeping me isolated in my flat and the secrecy of our relationship.

I know it is irrational, but some Sundays I varied my connection from Angel and changed at Euston instead of King’s Cross. I knew no one was following me, but such manoeuvres formed part of a mental foreplay, adding to the illicitness of our encounters. I had done the same after leaving Harrow, convinced my grandparents were searching for me.

At first I had once or twice arrived late, just to let Luke sweat. But recently my anxiety that he mightn’t turn up had grown so acute that I hated the uncertainty. We were crazy to cling to this location, where Luke might be spotted, but we seemed unwilling to initiate any change. The temporariness of the hotel suited us, keeping further commitment at bay. Yet this arrangement couldn’t be indefinite. Eventually one of us would arrive and instinctively know that the other wasn’t late, they had simply ceased coming.

It was early December before we quarrelled. My period wasn’t quite over yet. The receptionist eyed us more inquisitively every week and, although I wasn’t bothered by her glances, I didn’t want her prying at bloodied sheets after we left. Sex had been the reason for our dates and so, although I wanted to see Luke, I almost didn’t turn up that week. Perhaps I was afraid of the vacuum its absence might leave, but Luke said that the sex wasn’t important, for him at least, and it would be nice to talk for a change.

We did so in bed with the light out, smoking and sharing a bottle of gin. I wanted to roll a joint but Luke was old-fashioned about something as harmless as dope. As always, Luke talked while I probed. Our conversations had become a contest of wills where I tried to needle him into revealing more than he wished to. I told him almost nothing of myself and, although Luke initially appeared open, I soon realised how tightly he defined the world he chose to tell me about.

His talk was mostly about childhood in Dublin, yet the younger self he described seemed removed from the Luke I knew. Silences punctuated his stories so that they made little chronological sense, while nothing was said about the current occupations of his two brothers, who populated every story he told, and his own life in London might not have existed.

‘Why did you really come over here?’ I asked as we lay, with the bottle half-empty. Somehow the sensation of being in bed without having made love felt more intimate than anything we’d done before.

‘You get sick of living in people’s shadows,’ he replied, taking another slug and staring at the ceiling. ‘Over here you’re nobody, everyone lives their own life. My neighbour has stupid bloody pillars outside his house with ornate balls on top. Last Christmas I was reversing into my driveway when I knocked into one them. He came running out and it was the first time he’d bothered speaking to me after eight years there.’

‘What did he say?’

‘How dare you reverse into my balls!’ Luke’s English accent was perfect. I laughed.

‘He did not.’

‘No.’ Luke agreed. ‘Nothing as original as that.’

‘What would it be like in Dublin?’

‘Different.’ The humour drained from his voice.

‘Why?’

‘It just would be. People think they have your measure there, they point the finger.’

‘All the same, would you be happier there?’

‘Happy?’ he snorted. ‘What the fuck has happy got to do with it? I came here tonight to forget that shite, all right.’

I knew by his tone that the conversation had steered out of bounds. Luke turned, his hands sliding down my back and probing into my knickers. But I also knew he didn’t really want sex, he just wanted any intimacy kept at bay. It made me feel cheap and I pushed him off.

‘We agreed,’ I told him, ‘so don’t start.’

‘A few specks of blood never hurt nobody,’ he replied. ‘Besides, there’s more ways than one.’

‘Just go and fuck yourself.’ I began to climb from the bed, angered by his deliberate mockery. ‘Fuck off and play with yourself.’

I started getting dressed, as angry with myself as with him. I had helped set these rules, knowing our relationship couldn’t survive beyond these walls. I had never wanted soppy confessions or post-coital angst. But I didn’t know what I wanted any more.

‘Listen, Tracey.’ Luke’s tone was conciliatory. ‘I didn’t mean …’

‘You did,’ I said. ‘Be honest, that’s all you see me as, a tart, a piece of fluff on the side.’

My back was turned. I had just ripped my skirt in my haste to put it on. I didn’t want him looking at me half dressed.

‘Is that how you really see yourself?’

I turned, my hand holding closed the blouse I hadn’t time to button up. I was trembling.

‘You’re so clever, aren’t you?’ I sneered. ‘You always know how to shift it back on to me.’

‘You should never think of yourself like that.’ Luke sounded like a concerned father. He had retreated into his watchful, non-committal self.

‘Just how do you think of me?’

‘You don’t need to ask.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s obvious you’re using me. Once you come you’d sooner wave a magic wand and make me vanish.’

‘You never wanted lies before.’

‘I want the fucking truth.’

‘The truth is I’ll be here for you next week and every week.’ He watched as I managed to do up the last buttons on my blouse. I hated myself for shaking, but who the fuck was Luke anyway? I wasn’t asking him to leave his wife, I didn’t want more of his precious time, but just that once he might show a shred of affection.

‘You’re wasted in tiles,’ I said, grabbing my coat. ‘You should have gone into plastics. You could have simply moulded a likeness of me to blow up.’

I slammed the door. I could imagine the receptionist lifting her head. But when I got downstairs I found that for once I couldn’t stare back at her because that was how I felt, a cheap tart, some man’s weekend piece of fluff. I kept my head down until I reached the street and ran.

I didn’t go back the following Sunday or the Sunday after that. I did nothing, except sit in the flat and smoke roll ups. I stared blankly at titles in the video shop. I splashed out on cheap wine but couldn’t even seem to get drunk. Roxy and Honor had stopped calling, perhaps guessing at all the times I was really in with the light out. I could have called for them or taken off by myself like I used to, but I seemed drained of emotion.

There were Christmas lights everywhere, late night shopping and office parties. I considered phoning Harrow, but I didn’t want to think of home or Christmas or anything which might drag the past back. One night I dreamt about that old black monkey and woke scared and unsure of where I was. Our affair was over, I told myself. I needed my own life, not some other woman’s cast-offs. In Gran’s pet phrase, gleaned from years of specialists, I had an addictive personality. Luke was the latest addiction to break.

But Luke was the first encounter to really affect me since my mother’s death. Everything else had a second-hand flavour. I wondered if his wife had consented all along. Was that why he had been so open in the Irish Centre? But I knew she didn’t know, because wives never do, and I was trying to justify something which had increasingly disturbed me. Every day I told myself it was finished and yet that statement seemed too definite for something as vague as our relationship. Some days I decided I was just playing it cool and letting him sweat for a while. I could break this habit whenever I wanted, but perhaps I should use Luke to get me over the loneliness of Christmas. The problem was that his absence made me realise how empty my life was.

On December the fifteenth I decided to visit his shop. I was on a tube and impulsively stayed on after my stop. I watched the stations flash past, not certain if I’d actually go in or what I expected to happen if Luke was there. Maybe I wanted to haul our relationship out into the wintry light of a Wednesday afternoon and see if anything remained. I just knew I couldn’t leave matters as they stood and I couldn’t walk back into that hotel any more than I could break away from Luke.

The store was crowded with serious-looking DIY folk beautifying their houses for Christmas. Piped carols were interrupted by special offer announcements. I felt an almost vengeful enjoyment in being there, setting the agenda for once. I moved around the aisles, watching his staff work and wondering if he was here or in the smaller shop a few miles away. The staff were young and well trained, marked out by red company jumpers and enthusiasm. I could hear them repeat the same soothing phrase, ‘I’m not trying to sell you this but it might just suit …”

A supervisor in a dark suit checked off a stocklist with a visiting sales rep. I passed him twice before I stopped to look back. It was Luke. I watched his eyes flick between the printed order form and the shelves. I felt chilled. I hadn’t recognised him and now, when I did, I realised that I didn’t know this man and I could never have slept with him. The rep was leaving. Luke called something after him. Even his voice sounded different. I was watching a chameleon. Luke turned to look straight through me for several moments before it occurred to him who I was. His face changed but only slightly. It showed neither encouragement nor surprise. I realised I couldn’t talk to him here, I had nothing to say to this man. I backed away, fleeing down a side aisle to escape.

The following Sunday I left it late before deciding to visit the hotel. There were delays with the tube and when it finally came three girls stood by the door laughing hysterically at their own inane comments, as if anxious to antagonise the whole carriage. After Wednesday’s visit I had sworn never to go near that hotel again. Yet at King’s Cross I raced through the passageways connecting the Northern and Circle lines.

I got stuck behind an old man struggling up the escalator with a suitcase. The case stuck out, blocking the left side where people tried to rush past. They cursed him silently and not so silently as he ignored the log-jam behind him. There was something unnerving in his stillness as he stared up the escalator as though a great fate awaited beyond the ticket barrier, which he had only to haul his battered case across the forecourt to confront.

Honor once told me she believed in angels after seeing one pass her window as a little girl. Momentarily I forgot Luke as I watched the old man, fixated by the notion that he was a soul on its ultimate journey. Perhaps this underground was full of ghosts that nobody noticed as they vanished down tunnels at the end of deserted platforms. I couldn’t remember if I had read about such a notion, but, as a child, shabby old men with cases had fascinated me with the unspoken fear that they were my dark father come back.

The suitcase bumped over the rim of the escalator and the old man stumbled, trying to hold it. I pushed past and ran down more stairs just in time to catch the train pulling out on the Circle Line. Yet all the way to Edgware Road I felt an obscure foreboding that I hadn’t stopped to help him.

There was no guarantee that Luke would have come or would wait this late. But I felt he would have taken my appearance in the store as a sign that I wanted to talk. If he didn’t show up then at least I’d be freed from the illusion that I had found somebody who needed me.

I emerged at Edgware Road into light rain and walked quickly on. Looking back, I realise that if I had paused to help the old man with his case I might have missed my connection and arrived so late that I would have run past the shops opposite the Irish Centre. Instead I slowed to stroll casually past so as not to attract attention. Apart from the restaurant with its bored belly dancer, only the newsagent was open, although even he had one shutter down. I saw him closing up, with a huge rack of foreign newspapers pulled in out of the rain. An Irish Sunday paper was there, incongruous among the mass of Arabic newsprint. I could hardly see the photograph in it and had gone past when the eyes drew me back. I leaned against the glass. It couldn’t be Luke, I thought, starting to panic. It was like him, but the face was stockier, the eyes more cold. Ironically it was the suit I recognised first, because, as suits go, Christy Duggan’s taste was pretty appalling. The photograph was obviously a family one, taken at a christening or wedding. I banged on the glass. At first I thought the shopkeeper wasn’t going to bother opening up. The paper was folded, but I could still make out the headline, Dublin Gangland Murder.

I stood outside under a streetlamp, reading the account of his killing over and over until the rain distorted the newsprint. Now I knew that Luke wouldn’t be in the hotel. He would have no way of letting me know the news and no way of guessing that I knew. But I walked on anyway, in case there was a message at reception. I wanted there to be a different receptionist, but the same one eyed me coldly, sensing she had the upper hand.

‘Is there a letter for me here?’ I asked.

‘I’m not his messenger,’ she retorted. ‘Go up and ask him yourself.’

She turned a page of her magazine, deliberately not looking up until I’d gone. I reached the top of the stairs. I hadn’t expected this. I must be important if Luke had found time to see me tonight. We had always kept emotions at bay and now I felt ill-equipped to console him. It didn’t seem right to walk in on his grief. I knocked twice before he opened the door. If he had been crying it was well hidden. He stepped back to allow me in.

‘Luke, I know and I’m sorry,’ I said.

He gave a half shrug. ‘It was all my fault.’

Even when confronting death he seemed composed. His suit was immaculate although the shirt collar looked scuffed. His manner was more apologetic than mournful.

‘You can’t blame yourself,’ I said. ‘I’m just surprised you came tonight.’

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘We can’t let setbacks get in our way.’

He took a pull of his cigar and I realised that my suspicions were right all along. He was a total chameleon, a conman who felt nothing for anybody. I remembered his hands on my neck that first night. He could have killed me and thought nothing of it. Luke studied my face, concerned.

‘What’s wrong, Tracey?’ he said. ‘I’m here to apologise for the row. I’m sorry about the shop, but we’re so busy before Christmas that I was miles away. You were gone before I’d time to say anything.’

He hadn’t realised I was talking about Christy. He thought I didn’t know what had happened.

‘I don’t fucking believe this,’ I sneered. ‘You don’t even let death get in the way of a quick fuck!’

I backed away, ready to flee and Luke reached a hand out.

‘Don’t fucking touch me,’ I shouted. Then I looked at his eyes and realised that Luke hadn’t heard the news from Dublin.

‘Where have you been all day?’

He looked confused by the question. ‘I was in Holland since Friday, buying stock from a tile shop closing down over there. I took the van across. It’s parked outside still.’

‘Oh my God.’ I paused but couldn’t find a way to soften the words. ‘Luke, I’m sorry, but your brother Christy was shot dead in Dublin.’

Only when I held up the sodden newspaper did Luke realise I was serious. His face changed. He took it from me and turned away. I saw his head move as he scanned the blurred columns. Newsprint had stained my hands, the words printed backwards across my fingers. I looked up and realised that Luke was no longer attempting to read. He was silently crying. I went to put my arms around his shoulders, then stopped. Luke had always maintained an emotional distance between us. I could only watch, afraid that any attempt to console him would be rejected.

‘Would you like me to go?’

‘No. Please.’ He walked to the window and put his hands on the pane. I could see him reflected in it and he could see me.

‘You were close, weren’t you?’ I said.

‘He could beat the crap out of me, but he’d murder anyone who put a finger near me as well. I was fifteen before I’d clothes of my own. I lived in his hand-me-downs, vests, underpants, even his shoes sometimes.’ Luke turned. His face seemed to have aged a decade. ‘Even adults were scared of him. He’d take on blokes twice his size and beat them. Yet I was the one always trying to mind him.’

I knew by the way Luke stood that he wanted to be held. I put my arms around him and he buried his face in my hair where I couldn’t see him cry. I recalled a story he once told me, set on a factory roof somewhere in Dublin called Rialto. Luke had heard that Christy and an older boy were breaking in there but he knew their plan was inept. The roofs were slippery after rain as he crossed valleys of corrugated iron and hammered glass, searching for them. A watchman’s torch flashed below, followed by an alsatian’s muffled bark. Then, somewhere among the rooftops, he heard sporadic sobbing. It was too dangerous to call out. Luke waited till the crying resumed, then took a bearing and slid down a gully, where a loose rivet ripped his jeans and flesh. His boots collided with Christy, who rocked back and forth, his crying frightening Luke more than the danger of being caught. Luke stared at the glass below on the concrete floor. The light was bright enough to make the shards sparkle and for Luke to see that the fallen figure lying there had a broken neck.

I stroked Luke’s hair, which was thinning and greying at the roots with traces of dandruff. I felt so desperately sorry, but there seemed nothing I could say to console him. I could see those boys in my mind, Luke trying to guide his brother like a blubbering child along the rooftops as he watched for the security guard and unchained dog. Luke had known how to escape. But Christy had seized up, unable to climb down, even after they heard the body being found and knew the police had been called. Luke remained, minding Christy until the firemen raised their ladders, although he knew he would also be charged and sentenced to an Irish industrial school.

Luke raised his head and wiped his eyes.

‘You should go home,’ I said. ‘People will be looking for you.’

‘I don’t like home,’ he replied. ‘Before meeting you I thought that what I wanted wasn’t important. I put my head down and got on with working for my family. Suits aren’t meant to contain feelings. I should go home, there’s business to take care of. But fuck it, Tracey, I don’t want to ever leave this room.’

‘You’ve no choice,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re needed there.’

‘Come with me.’

I thought of his wife and children. ‘You know I can’t, Luke. But I’ll drive with you if you want and see you get safely there.’

‘I didn’t mean home here,’ Luke said. ‘It’s Dublin I hate. I haven’t gone back for years. I’m not sure I can face watching gangsters queue up to shake my hand and knowing one of them set Christy up. Come to Dublin. It would mean so much to know you’re there. I need you with me, Tracey. Please.’

III DUBLIN

EIGHT

LUKE’S WIFE AND CHILDREN would be arriving from London on a later flight. It was a fact Luke simply had to live with, he explained, normally you got hassled by the police at Dublin airport. The family name was enough, it just took one detective trying to get himself a reputation. This was why Luke had deliberately raised his children in England. Now he wanted them kept away from all that. I was discovering that Luke had an excuse for everything, even taking his mistress with him on a flight to Dublin while his wife and children travelled alone.

Security at Dublin Airport was non-existent. The terminal was like a cathedral of homecoming, with Christmas trees and clock-work Santa Clauses in the centre of each luggage conveyor belt. People collected their luggage, then drifted through the blue channel where nobody was on duty. No official paid Luke the slightest heed. Crowds thronged the arrivals hall, greeting returning family members. Luke’s younger brother, Shane, had arranged to meet him. I could see him trying to place my face.

‘Who’s she?’ he asked suspiciously as Luke put the bags down.

‘Stick around for Carmel and the kids, Shane,’ Luke replied, ignoring the question. ‘They’re on the next plane. We’ll get a taxi.’

But Shane still stared at me. He had an open, innocent face. In soft light he would still pass for someone in their twenties. I remembered him acting as a peace-maker in the Irish Centre. ‘Ah, for Jaysus sake, Luke,’ he cottoned on, more exasperated than annoyed.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘Luke’s just some cheap lay I picked up on the flight over.’

Shane threw his eyes to heaven, then picked up the cases and led the way to the car park. Luke’s wife could make her own way into Dublin. There was an uneasiness between them, with my presence preventing Shane from discussing family matters. I felt Luke had placed me there like a shield. At the car Luke asked to drive and Shane mumbled about him not being covered by insurance before grudgingly handing the keys over.

Shane sat beside him in silence as we drove on to the motorway. I noticed that Luke didn’t turn for Dublin, but drove in the opposite direction to where it petered out into an ordinary road again. The unease I’d known on the flight returned. It had gnawed at me since driving with Luke to the corner of his street in London and watching from the shadows as he reversed past his neighbour’s ornate pillars up to his front door where figures rushed out to claim him back.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘The scenic route,’ he replied shortly. We reached a small roundabout and Luke turned left on to a smaller country road which was ploughed up, with pipes and machinery parked on what was once a grass verge. Luke seemed to be trying to track back to Dublin along a network of lanes crisscrossing the countryside between the airport and the city. But there were half finished roads and diversions everywhere. Shane remained silent, slotted into his role as a younger brother, yet I sensed his satisfaction as it became obvious that Luke was lost. I had expected tears at the airport or angry promises of revenge, but instead a web of tension and distrust hung between them. Christy had not yet been mentioned.

‘Where the fuck am I?’ Luke was forced to mutter at last.

‘It’s structural funds from Brussels, that Maastricht shite we got bribed into voting for a couple of years back. You’d know about it if your Government across the water allowed people a say in anything.’

‘What do you mean, my Government?’ Luke said.

‘Well, you’re not exactly queueing up to vote here.’

‘Dublin is still my town and you know it,’ Luke said, suddenly bitter.

I thought neither was going to back down, then Shane said quietly: ‘I know, but if you want to convince people it might be wiser to come home more than once every five years.’

Luke stared ahead, trying to recognise some landmark.

‘I hardly know this way myself,’ Shane added, soothingly. ‘The Government’s gone mad for building roads.’

‘So everybody can emigrate quicker.’ The bitterness in Luke’s voice seemed tempered as he admitted to himself he was lost. ‘I wanted to slip in by the back of Ballymun.’

‘You’re miles away,’ Shane said. ‘Half the old roads are closed. They’re ringing the whole city by a motorway.’

‘You could have said something.’

Shane shrugged and Luke pulled in among a line of JCBs and earthmovers parked beside a half constructed flyover. Below us, an encampment of gypsy caravans had already laid claim to an unopened stretch of motorway. Luke got out to change places. The brothers passed each other in the headlights of the car. Shane got back in, but Luke stood for a moment, caught in those lights, staring down at the caravans.

The fields beyond were littered with upturned cars, where men moved about, dismantling vehicles for spare parts in the half light. Cars were pulled in as motorists negotiated deals at the open door of a caravan. Children in ragged coats played hide and seek among the smashed bonnets and rusting car doors. A dog vanished into a pile of tyres. Smoke was rising and although the windows were closed I was convinced I could smell burning rubber. I wondered again what my life would have been like if Mammy hadn’t persuaded Frank Sweeney to move to Harrow three months before I was born. I stared at the mucky children careering through the wrecked cars. This was what I had been saved from. As a child I’d had romantic visions about what it might be like, but now it felt as if Gran was beside me, smugly witnessing the justification of everything she had done. What would Luke feel if he knew that his mistress was an Irish tinker’s daughter?

‘Are you English?’ Shane asked quietly.

‘Yeah,’ I said, looking away from the children.

‘Just don’t come to the house or the funeral, please.’

There was no animosity in his tone. I didn’t know if he saw my nod in reply, but he flicked the lights for Luke to get back in. Instead of sitting next to him, Luke climbed into the back seat beside me. I had never known him to display affection but now he reached for my hand and I sensed Shane tracking the movement in the rear-view mirror. Shane started the car.

‘Does Carmel know?’ he asked after a moment.

‘Neither do you,’ was Luke’s terse reply. The tension between them was only partly to do with me. Luke stared out at the December twilight and I could only guess at his thoughts. Five minutes later we pulled in at the entrance to an exclusive golf course. Shane cut off the engine and the brothers stared up the long curving driveway.

‘The back of McKenna’s farm,’ Luke said eventually.

‘I didn’t know if you’d recognise it.’

‘I’m not likely to forget the shape of that blasted hill, am I?’

A BMW came down the driveway and accelerated away. Shane watched the tail lights disappear.

‘I said it to Christy,’ Shane said, ‘the week before they shot him. There was no need for all this aggravation for years. He should have just bought McKenna’s land and built a golf course. You sit on your arse all day and they queue up to hand their money over.’

It was the first time Christy was mentioned and although nothing else was said it seemed to ease the reserve between them. Perhaps their shared memories were so engrained that they couldn’t speak of them. But, from stories Luke had told me after love-making, I began to understand the need he had felt to drive out here. It was a need Shane must have understood. Soon Luke would be swamped by his extended family, with public rituals and duties to perform. But here in the gathering dark, the space existed to come to terms with death.

On the flight over I had told him for the first time about my mother’s death and my visits to Northwick hospital as she grew weaker and more withdrawn until she had just stared back at me. I had grown to hate those visits and to hate myself for resenting the way she used silence like an accusation. I had avoided being there when my grandparents visited, but once I met an old school friend of hers, Jennifer, who called me out into the corridor. ‘She’s dying,’ she said. ‘So what are you doing to contact him?’ I had stared back, uncomprehendingly. ‘Your father,’ Jennifer said angrily. ‘Surely at least the man has a right to know his wife is dying.’

It was the first time I’d ever had to think of him as flesh and blood. He had been an abstraction before, a shameful bogey-man. Frank Sweeney would be eighty if still alive. But because no one spoke of him, I’d presumed him long dead. I had read in a magazine that the average life-span of Irish travellers was under fifty. Even if he were alive, I had told Jennifer, I could hardly chase around every campsite in Ireland. He’d had twenty years to contact us. Besides, after what he’d done, my mother would hardly want to see him now.

Jennifer had a large house in Belgravia, a husband working in the City, children who passed through private schools and emerged polished as porcelain. All the things Gran had wanted for her daughter. Yet although Gran spoke of Jennifer glowingly, I’d never known her to set foot inside our house. Now she glared at me in the hospital corridor. ‘Did you ask her?’ she had snapped, momentarily furious. ‘You’re not a child any more, Tracey. You’ve caused your mother nothing but grief with your silly games and yet you’ve never bothered to find out the least thing.’

Jennifer was right and I knew it. At a certain level I had always withdrawn from other people’s pain into my interior world. After she left I went back to my mother’s ward and asked nothing that might require an awkward response. I had matched her silence with silence and, later, Gran’s grief with flight. This was partly why it had felt important to come to Dublin and to just once be there when somebody needed me.

Luke stared up at the lights of the clubhouse and I squeezed his palm. The curved lake, lit by spotlights beside the final green, had to be man-made. I glanced at Luke’s face, feeling I was in the way, but also that he wanted me here. I could imagine all three brothers here as boys of twelve, eleven and ten, with those extra years providing a hierarchical chain of command. These roads would have been smaller as they walked out among similar bands of boys at dawn. One night Luke had described McKenna, a burly countryman wrapped in the same greatcoat in all weathers, who would eye up the swarms of boys to decide who might have the honour of filling his baskets with fruit and who would walk the two miles back to the city disappointed.

I remembered how Luke pronouced McKenna’s name with quiet contempt, but also a faint echo of childhood awe which I could imagine no adult adversary ever meriting. I couldn’t remember the full story, except that it was the first time I’d heard Shane mentioned in detail. He would have been sandwiched between Luke and Christy among the crowd of boys as McKenna made his choice so that all three appeared to be strong, hardened workers. Luke and Christy had covered up for him when his back ached and his hands blistered during the endless day of picking until finally his tally of baskets began to drop. There was a row and Shane had broken down in tears as McKenna threw a handful of coins on the ground and spat on them.

‘Was McKenna mean?’ I asked Shane.

He snorted. ‘As mean as the back of his balls that only ever knew shite.’ He glanced back, apologetic for his language. It was thirty years since those events but they still rankled. We eyed each other openly.

‘How do I measure up to the others?’ I asked him.

‘There have been no others.’ Shane re-started the car and I believed him and beneath my show of toughness I felt better. Luke ignored our exchange. I wondered what Shane thought of me and was it contempt for his opinion or a bond between brothers which allowed Luke to display his mistress so openly. For the next two days I would have to remain invisible and I sensed that this journey was perhaps Luke’s only way to give some acknowledgement to my presence. Shane would never mention me, not even to his own wife. I suspected there were more dangerous secrets locked away in Shane’s head that would always stay there with a younger brother’s unquestioning loyalty.

We had reached the fringe of the city where back gardens of shabby houses petered out into overgrown fields. Children stood about on corners, with hoods over their heads.

‘What happened to McKenna?’ I asked.

‘He died years ago,’ Shane said. ‘The last time I saw him he was screaming like a madman up at our house when I was ten. He claimed Christy blinded two of his cattle because he’d cheated me out of a day’s pay.’

‘How do you mean blinded?’

‘The police said it was done with sticks,’ Shane replied. ‘They cleared us of involvement, but McKenna wouldn’t believe it. He was ranting, threatening our Ma who was trying to raise us without a penny the time Da had to go to England for work.’

The thought of such cruelty sickened me. Christy had a reputation for violence, but this was too extreme even for a twelve year old like him.

‘Did Christy do it?’ I asked.

‘Are you joking?’ Shane laughed, coming to a supermarket and turning left. ‘Poor Christy go up to the fields by himself in the dark and do the likes of that? He liked animals, Christy did, well dogs and pigeons anyway. Cows gave him the creeps. He was a city kid. He might have done McKenna himself, but cows? No way. That wouldn’t have been Christy’s style.’

We stopped at traffic lights. Horses stood motionless on a green, tied with lengths of rope. In the darkness beside them dozens of Christmas trees were propped up as if a forest had dropped from the sky. Two boys in over-sized duffel coats hunched down waiting for buyers. The lights changed.

‘It was a typical job by your man beside you,’ Shane said as he moved off. ‘Luke goaded the other kids about being chicken until they went up the fields while the three of us sat at home with alibis watching The Man from Uncle.’

Luke laughed and looked at me. ‘Don’t believe a word that fellow says,’ he said, almost absentmindedly. ‘It’s what Shane does best, wind people up.’

I laughed too, but the problem was that I did believe Shane or, at least, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. True or false, two images stuck in my mind. One was of cows bellowing in agony as blood streamed down their faces and a circle of boys dropped their sticks and ran off with their bravado replaced by a realisation that they had been used. The second image was almost as chilling: an eleven year old calmly standing at his front door during the ad breaks on television where he would be seen by passing neighbours.

As if sensing my unease, Luke took my hand again. Suddenly I wanted to return to my life in London. I felt used as well, manipulated into thinking he needed me here. A suspicion came back even as I tried to dismiss it. Could Luke have known of Christy’s death all along, but had come to the hotel for sex anyway, not thinking that I could know? Might he have turned my knowledge to his advantage, sensing a need which he could exploit? Or did my own secretive nature make me suspect him? I wasn’t being fully honest with him about my reasons for agreeing to travel to Dublin. I knew nobody here. I would have to walk around alone or wait in some hotel bedroom until Luke found time to come. The unintended irony of the phrase made me feel cheap. I closed my eyes and the image of blinded cattle returned. I wondered again if Luke’s wife knew of my existence and, if she discovered I was here, what might be her measure of revenge?

We turned down a side road with a high wall, beyond which I could glimpse the roofs of unlit school buildings. A notice warned of guard dogs, but Shane turned through the gate and across a cattle grid to park with his headlights shining over a panoramic view of streets beyond the dark playing pitches. Luke seemed momentarily disorientated as Shane glanced back, awaiting some response.

‘Christy drove by here six months ago and almost crashed,’ Shane said.

‘I believe it,’ Luke said quietly. ‘It’s thirty years since I’ve seen that view.’

‘The pre-fab was levelled last year,’ Shane told him. ‘They finally built a permanent extension, out where the sheds used to be. Take a look.’

They both got out, caught up in memories I didn’t know, and walked into the glare of the headlights. I watched them bend their heads to talk. Their brother had been one of Dublin’s most notorious criminals. I hadn’t asked Luke who had killed him or what could happen next. As long as he kept me ignorant I had felt I wasn’t involved. Now that we were actually in Dublin I was scared. I didn’t know how much of this fear was bound up with Luke or how much stemmed from a terror of confronting ghosts I had spent half my life running from. Yet I knew those spectres had to be banished before I might begin to see some value in myself. It was because I regarded myself so cheaply that I never trusted anyone who reached out to me. Luke’s grief in the hotel was real because he had cried like I never could. He wouldn’t risk bringing me here unless his need was also genuine.

The two brothers cast out vast shadows in the headlights. I got out to see what they were examining. It was a flat expanse of floor tiles left behind after a pre-fabricated building had been demolished. I could decipher shapes of classrooms from the different styles of tiling. I sensed Luke visualising the building as it had once stood. He climbed up and followed the route of a vanished corridor, retracing his steps to the spot where Christy and he had first shared a desk. We had moved beyond the headlights so that we were now shadows in the dark. If I’d believe in spirits I would have said that Christy’s was there at that moment, along with the younger Luke and Shane, hungry for the lives ahead of them.

‘If Christy was older why were you in the same class?’ I asked, to break the atmosphere. Luke looked back, momentarily drawn into the present.

‘Holy communion,’ he explained. ‘Ma had to put him back a class when he was seven. She couldn’t afford the clothes that year.’

He walked to where the classroom wall had once stood and looked across at the lights from neighbouring streets. The main school stood in darkness to our right while there was ugly security fencing around the graceful old building on our left.

‘That was a fever convalescent hospital once,’ Shane said, motioning me to leave Luke alone. ‘When our folks came here first there were still old people in bath chairs coughing up blood under the trees. When TB died out the Christian Brothers opened a school instead. Not for corporation tenants like us, more for the private houses. But the place kept growing until one summer he was home from England, Da got a job sticking this prefab up to cope with the over-crowding.’

Luke had walked further away with his head bowed.

‘I can remember being given jam sambos and sent down to watch Da working,’ Shane said. ‘Ma kept badgering Da to have a word with the Brothers about us getting in here. Luke and Christy were steeped, free secondary education had just arrived. Before then it would have been the Tech or looking for whatever work we could find at fourteen.’

Luke turned. Although it was dark I sensed he’d been crying, or had come as close to tears as he ever would in public. ‘You stupid poor bastard, Christy,’ he said, almost to himself. He looked at Shane. ‘Somebody set him up, didn’t they?’

‘Somebody did,’ Shane agreed carefully, aware of my presence.

‘I don’t want to know who it was, you understand? Tell your son that. Half-arsed revenge won’t bring him back.’

‘Al never took any part …’

‘I know,’ Luke said. ‘Al’s a good kid, so this isn’t the time to start.’ He looked around. ‘I remember trying to drag Christy here every morning. Ma always said it was my job to keep him out of trouble.’

‘Christy liked trouble,’ Shane replied. Luke walked towards us and Shane put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You could have done nothing, Luke.’

‘Come on.’ Luke replied. ‘This place makes me feel old.’

‘You are old,’ Shane joked, but Luke just grunted and walked towards the car headlights, stepping on all the cracks now, deliberately walking through invisible walls. We followed.

‘I didn’t want to come,’ I told Shane. ‘I just felt I couldn’t refuse him.’

‘Everything will work out fine,’ Shane said, more to himself than me.

‘How long did Christy last here?’

‘Eighteen months of hassle till he got expelled and found a job on the milk floats,’ Shane said. ‘Luke was different. The Brothers hated him and he hated them. The year he got put away in Saint Raphael’s Industrial School they thought they’d seen the back of him, but he came back, put his head down and got first in the school in the Leaving Cert. I think he did it to spite them.’

Back in the car I knew the tour of the past was over. Luke sat beside Shane and they discussed practical arrangements, with Luke rechecking each detail of the funeral. There was something chilling in his tone, as if the business of burying his brother was like another shipment of tiles. I felt in the way. Mentally Luke was back among his family, a different person from the man I’d known in London or even the one who had cried in those school ruins moments before.

He had booked a single room for me in a hotel among a maze of tree-lined streets in Glasnevin. When we pulled up outside it I felt he was anxious to be gone. Shane took my case from the boot. The three of us stood there awkwardly. A handshake would have been ludicrous but I knew Luke wouldn’t display any token of affection. It was Shane who reached across to kiss my cheek. He smiled and opened the car door for Luke.

‘Don’t mind him,’ he said. ‘Your first time in Dublin, eh? You have a good time, you hear me?’

NINE

BUT ACTUALLY IT WASN’T the first time I’d ever been in Dublin. I remember, one night, watching a programme about the miracle of migration, how the tiniest of birds can instinctively plot a flight path across oceans and continents back to the nondescript cluster of trees where they had pecked their shells asunder. A camera hidden above the nest had shown the chicks with their beaks open, awaiting their mother’s return. Their luminous eyes had never ceased gazing up, scanning the constellations and logging the precise configuration of the Plough and Orion and Seven Sisters at that fixed point of their birth, so that no matter how far they scattered, they could perpetually track a course back home.

There had been no stars on the ceiling of that hotel near Dublin’s bus station when I was eleven years of age. Instead there had been tributaries and deltas of cracks, pencil-thin veins that clenched themselves up into shapes of staring eyes and demonic heads. I had lain alone beneath them, both longing for and dreading my mother’s return. There were footsteps on the ceiling above me, the creaking of a bed gathering meaning and pace. Part of the adjoining room jutted out into ours, a plywood alcove where water sporadically gushed from a tap to cloak the hiss of some man’s piss seeping into the sink. The muffled thump of a rock band echoed from the bowels of the shabby building. I had known that my mother was down there, in the dreary lounge overlooking the dangerous street which filled up with shouts, stampeding boots and the shrieks of girls every night at closing time. I was frightened she would meet someone; that perhaps, even now, the creaking bed above me contained her sweating body. I was frightened she would open the hotel door and disappear down those steps into the Dublin night. Most of all, I was scared our money would run out and there would be a scene with other guests staring at us and whispering.

The hotel room made me feel as poor as white trash. An ambulance hustled past with a flicker of blue light. My mother would have finished the three drinks she always allowed herself. I could see her sitting alone among the young couples, nursing the melted ice in her glass as she fretted against the nightly temptation to splash out on a fourth vodka. Soon she would be up. I closed my eyes but the motif of hair-line cracks kept watch above me, staring eyes waiting to catch mine. My stomach was sour with greasy food and anxiety because, after five days, this secret holiday had ceased to be an adventure.

It had seemed exciting when we planned it first, in whispered conversations in the back garden where Grandad Pete had lain down an ornate pond. Fish darted in and out between the perilously balanced rocks, red tails flitting for cover whenever I rippled the surface with my finger. I had never been allowed pets. Now I had spent each June twilight rocking back and forth on a tyre swing suspended from the cherry blossom tree beside the pond, watching in case our neighbour’s cat sprang down from the fence where he perched in uncanny stillness.

Mammy had been off work again since the start of May. ‘Resting’ was the term which Granny taught me to repeat to anyone who asked. For the first fortnight we had visited her in a nursing home with tropical plants and bright windows where people sat like statues. But she was home now. She was better, perpetually smiling and with buoyant words gushing from her. Every evening she began to come out into the garden to push me. I loved to hear her talk like that, after months of withdrawn silence, bubbling away about things I couldn’t follow and then breaking easily into laughter at some joke I told her from school. She had a new pet phrase which I heard repeated a dozen times every evening – ‘wouldn’t it be nice’. At first I think that, even for herself, those words were little more than vague aspirations, but gradually I had sensed a difference in her voice as she homed in on them again and again. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was just you and me for a change? Wouldn’t it be nice if the pair of us visited Ireland?’

Every evening as she laughed and leaned against my shoulder to push me further into the blue air, I felt she was inserting a pause for me to fill in after the words. Even at eleven I knew she would never have the strength to decide any course of action by herself. ‘Why don’t we just go then?’ I said one twilight. She pushed me higher, almost as if buying herself time. I had looked behind as the tyre swung back. Her face was child-like, unable to conceal her delight. I felt suddenly older and protective of her. I kicked the ground and swung the tyre round to stare clandestinely at her, sister to sister. ‘Alright then, this is what we do,’ she had whispered confidentially, swinging the tyre back round to push me again, as though afraid we were being watched.

In the week that followed we never discussed our plans in the house, even when we were alone there. These secrets were confined to outside with the fish lurking beneath the stones, the branch creaking under the swaying tyre and early summer light succumbing to dark. We were conspirators. Our plans were real and yet, even up to the morning we left, they still had the feel of a child’s game. I had packed spare clothes into my school bag, cycled off as usual and even chained my bicycle in the school yard. It was my final week in Northwick Primary school. Class-mates chattered on their way to assembly. I walked back out of the school gates, resisting the urge to run to where my mother was waiting. It felt like being in a film as we hugged each other at the ticket desk and then raced along the platform at Harrow on the Hill station.

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