‘OK, OK, spare me the sob story, you can come in.’ Martha stepped back and widened the door so that Cillian could walk past her, into the sitting room that he remembered, where the couch still sat, the one that was too big for the room, the one she’d bought anyway. It was one of those squashy couches that made it difficult to get up once you’d sat down. The place was in darkness, the curtains shut tight across the patio door. He flicked the switch on the lamp beside the couch. He didn’t sit on the couch. He pulled out a kitchen chair instead, sat down, glanced around. He couldn’t see any sign of Dan. No meditation mats or empty bottles of ... what was that fancy Champagne? Bollinger? On top of the sideboard lay her violin, intact now although the cracks along its body were still visible.
‘Still playing?’ he said, nodding towards the instrument. Martha looked at the violin and nodded, colouring slightly as if she, too, remembered the last time he had seen the violin.
He saw how she refused to wince as she settled herself on the couch.
‘Have you been to A&E?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Let me at least take a look at you,’ he said.
‘I’m fine. It looks worse than it is.’
He stood anyway, walked to the fridge. ‘You need something to take the swelling down,’ he said, opening the freezer door. It was better stocked than it used to be, not a single packet of Findus Crispy Pancakes to be seen. He rummaged through the frozen pastry and chicken fillets and found a bag of peas, which he handed to her. She hesitated but then held it against her face.
‘I’ll make tea,’ he said, taking the milk out of the fridge. ‘You look like you could do with a cup. Have you eaten?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want toast?’
‘You don’t have to bother yourself, I’m well able to—’
‘Do you want toast?’
‘Yes,’ she said, adding a quiet, ‘please,’ after a pause.
He scanned the shelves quickly but could see no wine or whiskey bottles. He put the kettle on, dropped two slices of bread into the toaster.
‘So ...’ began Cillian, leaning against the kitchen counter, waiting for the kettle to boil. ‘How’ve you been?’
‘Well, I’ve a lump growing out of my forehead and a bruise on my side the size of a football but apart from that, yeah, fine. I’ve been fine. You?’
‘Well, I’ve a paper cut on my finger but other than that, yeah, fine. I’ve been fine.’
She smiled, then winced as the bruise on her face made itself felt. ‘I’ve always said police work was dangerous,’ she said.
It seemed almost normal, Cillian felt. Like their last conversation had never happened. Then Martha shifted on the couch and said, ‘So, have you made any arrests?’ and it wasn’t normal anymore. Or it was. Just a different kind of normal. He was here on business.
Cillian shook his head. ‘Not yet. The guy who I’m fairly sure organised the robbery has a credible alibi, as do his two cronies.’
‘And the kid? The one you feel responsible for?’
‘I don’t feel responsible for him.’
‘You always feel responsible for people.’
He knew what she was referring to. But it hadn’t been an intervention. It had been concern. He shouldn’t have. He had rocked their precarious boat until it capsized.
Cillian shrugged. ‘He’s a Polish lad. Roman Matus. Himself and his mother haven’t had it easy since they moved to Ireland. I think Roman was doing a bit of running for the drug dealer who I suspect carried out yesterday’s robbery but what happened at the bank ... I don’t know, it doesn’t fit with what I know of the kid. You were there. I’d like to get your insight.’
‘I see,’ Martha said, and then she paused and looked at him. ‘Why did you move back to Donegal?’ She asked the question with her usual brand of curiosity and directness. It had taken him a while to get used to it in the beginning.
Cillian considered making something up or saying something glib, skirting the issue. Instead he said, ‘Something happened on a job. A case I was working on. A kid got killed and ... I needed a change of scene, I suppose.’ It had happened a month after they’d split up but there was no need to mention that. They both knew about that.
‘There was an enquiry, wasn’t there?’
Cillian nodded. It had been reported in the papers.
The kettle whistled and he turned, glad of the diversion.
‘Tea or coffee?’ he called.
‘Tea, please. Black, and will you leave the teabag in?’
He didn’t tell her that he remembered.
He set the tea and toast on a coffee table, lifted the table and placed it beside the couch. He took out his phone, logged on to Pulse and located a photograph of Roman that had been taken when the boy had been cautioned a few months ago.
Roman looked younger than he was in the picture. Fear often had that effect on these kids’ faces. He held the screen towards Martha and she nodded and said, ‘That’s him.’
‘Did you see him shoot the old man?’ Cillian resumed his seat on the kitchen chair.
Martha’s eyes narrowed the way they had always done when she thought about things. She had never been a blurter, always considered questions before answering them, like she was checking the copy for accuracy.
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
Martha leaned her head against the back of the couch. She seemed suddenly tired.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cillian. ‘It’s just—’
‘I know, I know, you feel responsible.’ Her tone was dry but she told him anyway. Her recollection was almost word-for-word identical to the statement he had read that morning.
‘So,’ he said when she finished, ‘you can’t be a hundred per cent sure that it was Roman who fired the gun?’
Martha looked at him and her look was sceptical. She reached for her tea, wrapped her long hands around the mug, shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Is that what you want to hear?’
‘I’m just after the facts.’
‘No,’ she said again and there was a sigh in the word this time, a weariness, and he found himself wondering if she had slept and thinking that she probably hadn’t and knowing that it was none of his business either way. He stood up to go.
‘You didn’t make yourself a coffee,’ Martha said then.
‘No.’
‘You used to drink a lot of coffee.’ Her voice was faraway, like she was remembering something about him. About them.
He looked at his notebook.
‘You went into the bank with Tara, I see here. How’s she doing?’
‘She’s met somebody, would you believe. She’s even engaged, kind of,’ Martha said.
‘Kind of?’
‘You know Tara. She’s not your common-or-garden all-singing, all-dancing lesbian.’
Cillian nodded. ‘I didn’t have her down as the marrying kind.’
‘Neither did she,’ said Martha. ‘But then she met Mathilde.’ Martha shook her head. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘people can change.’ Her tone was flip, like it didn’t mean anything, what she said. It was just a collection of words, a sentence, something to fill the gaps. He put his hand on the back of the kitchen chair he had vacated. He felt awkward now, standing.
‘Anyway,’ Martha went on as if he hadn’t stood up, as if he wasn’t feeling awkward, ‘she had gone into the bank to tell her sister – you remember Katherine? She’s the bank manager there – that she’s gay and—’
‘She still hasn’t come out?’
‘Not in any formal sense, no. And definitely not to her family, although nobody would blame her on that score. She dragged me along for a bit of support. She had to go to hospital afterwards. The doctor says she’s in shock.’
‘Understandable, in the circumstances,’ said Cillian.
‘Not for Tara.’ Martha lifted the bag of peas from her temple, held it now against the bruising along her cheekbone. S
he chewed at a corner of her bottom lip and Cillian remembered that this was what she did when she was worried.
‘Is she in Beaumont?’
‘She is. I’m going to go in to see her this morning. Does your sister still work there?
‘Yeah. Joan’s the sister-in-charge there now.’
‘That’s pretty impressive.’
‘She loves it.’
In the silence that followed, Cillian could almost hear the two of them struggle to come up with something to say. The silence swelled, moved between them, like a complicated piece of music. ‘I’ll leave you to get some rest,’ he finally came up with.
‘It’s funny seeing you after all this time,’ Martha said and her voice was lower now, smaller somehow. He felt sort of relieved that he wasn’t the only one feeling awkward.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘How’ve you been?’
‘Fine, yeah ...’ He trailed off, then rallied with, ‘And you? And your husband? Stan, isn’t it?’
‘Dan.’ In spite of the bruising and swelling, Cillian could tell that there was a small smile on Martha’s face and that it was probably related to his deliberate misremembering of Dan’s name. He conceded that it was pretty childish. ‘Oh, yeah, Dan. How is he?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good.’
Cillian looked at his notes, leafed through them.
‘What about you?’ Martha asked then, looking at him with her investigative journalist look. From Elona when she’d been an investigative journalist. Back when he’d first met her.
‘Oh, you know, nothing major, just saving the world one case at a time.’
She smiled. She had always found his idealism both amusing and uplifting although she had never specified which finding held more weight.
‘Are you seeing anyone?’ Her directness was something he had learned to live with.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Stella.’
Martha nodded and he wondered if she already knew. About him and Stella. Although why would she? He couldn’t read her. He could never read her, even back in the days when he’d thought he could.
‘I should go.’ He walked into the kitchen, picked his jacket off the handle of the fridge where he’d left it. Martha’s eyes were on him as he turned.
‘You’ll be OK?’ he said.
‘I will.’
‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said, struggling into his jacket.
‘Thanks for making me tea and toast. I hadn’t realised I was hungry.’
‘You’re welcome.’ The awkwardness was there again, where it had no business being. Cillian felt it as something physical. He didn’t know how to say goodbye without it sounding graver than he intended. Final.
In the end, he didn’t say goodbye. Instead, he said, ‘We’ll keep you posted. And if you think of anything else that might be relevant, you can ... call me. Or the station.’
‘OK,’ said Martha, who looked exhausted now. Even the freckles on her face were pale.
‘Get some sleep, Martha.’ Her name, in his mouth, sounded strange. He hadn’t said it out loud in a long time.
‘I think I was asleep.’ she said. ‘I had a strange dream.’
He wanted to ask her about her dream. About the strangeness of it.
Instead, he let himself out as he said he would.
He had let himself out that last time too. Two years ago.
Six
Night had fallen. Roman stood in the middle of a field, looked around him. Up ahead, he could make out a dark line of trees. The only sound was the labour of his breath and the pounding of his blood through his veins. He gulped at the sharp night air. He could no longer smell the fumes of the burning car.
When his breath returned to him, he began to walk. He didn’t know what time it was or where he was. Lech had shown him how to navigate using the moon and the stars. But the sky was black tonight, the stars hidden behind a thick blanket of low-lying cloud.
Roman kept walking. The wind whipped around his bare head, his body. His face was numb. So were his fingers, his feet. He supposed he must be hungry although he didn’t feel it; he thought it was because of the cold, the insistence of it. He didn’t mind the rain at first. It was just a drizzle.
In the absence of a plan, Roman decided a couple of things. He would not think about Jimmy. What he might be planning. What he might do. To Roman if he caught him. What he could do. To Mama. Roman knew what Jimmy was capable of.
One of his mother’s newly learned expressions from her English classes at the nursing home was caught between a rock and a hard place. She had found it amusing, the expression, when she explained it to Roman. That was only last week and now, here he was, exactly as Rosa had explained. Caught between a rock and a hard place.
He thought trapped might be a better word.
He saw the building just as he thought he couldn’t walk one more step. Mama would have called it a sign. Roman called it a barn. A rusting, listing barn but it was unlocked and a couple of hay bales inside gave off a dense, sweet smell. Roman pulled the door behind him and forced himself to stand still while his eyes adjusted to the dark. It was as thick as mud, the dark. It was like a living thing, moving around him.
He’d never been afraid of the dark before.
A scratching noise in the corner. Mice probably. Or rats. Adam had told Roman that only rats and cockroaches would survive a zombie apocalypse. He didn’t know Roman was scared of rats. Not scared, exactly.
The noise was mice. Definitely mice. Roman wrapped his arms around himself and forced himself to stand there, wait.
Gradually, shapes grew out of the dark. Wooden stalls: empty. A three-legged milking stool. Frayed rope hanging off a long nail hammered into the wall. A shadow in the corner that looked like a man with his back to Roman which turned out to be an ancient overcoat that smelled of damp and moss.
He pulled handfuls of hay from a bale, arranged it on the ground in a stall. If Adam were here, he would call it an adventure. Find something to laugh about. Roman would laugh too because Adam was funny. Adam made him laugh.
He lay down and covered himself with the overcoat. He shut his eyes against the needle sharpness of the night air, the dampness of his clothes, the stink of the overcoat. Tried to will himself to sleep.
He was so tired. Even the act of falling asleep seemed like too much effort.
Mama would not be asleep. He knew that.
He pictured her lying in her bed in their rented room in Jimmy’s house. The room that Rosa had divided in two by draping a sheet across a makeshift line between her single bed and his sofa bed. ‘You need some privacy,’ she’d told him the day she did that, ‘now that you are becoming a man.’ Roman was supposed to lift the duvet off the sofa bed every morning, store it on top of the wardrobe, fold the bed back inside the sofa. Make the room seem more like a living room than a bedroom. He rarely did.
He saw her, wide-eyed in the dark, staring at the sofa bed where Roman should be, worrying. Mouthing a prayer, maybe. She prayed every night. Asked God to bless everyone and mind everyone. Even Uncle Lech, who had left everything in such a mess.
‘Don’t speak ill of the dead,’ Mama had told Roman.
Roman should have known, he often thought, afterwards. Everything had been going well. Too well. Something bad had to happen. That was the way things were.
Roman thought that bad things happened because of money. Not having enough of it. It was like a magnet, being poor. It attracted bad news. Like the way that he got that chest infection and Adam didn’t. They both got soaked that day. Wandered around Swords in their rain-wet clothes all afternoon. But it was Roman who got the chest infection. And Adam – whose father had a boat in his front garden and whose mother went to the beauty salon every Friday and called it her ‘me’ time – didn’t get a chest infection so his parents didn’t have to spend fifty euro on a doctor, then another twenty-five euro on antibiotics and paracetamol. Instead, Adam
got to go to his piano lesson and his scout meeting and his swimming class and his tae kwan do lesson.
He should have known that the bad thing – when it happened – would be really bad, seeing as there had been so many good things since they’d arrived in Ireland. A collection of good things. Great things, actually. Like Meadhbh, for example. It wasn’t spelled the way it sounded. That happened a lot with Irish names. She was shorter than Roman, which didn’t happen a lot. Blonde hair in a high ponytail. Clear blue eyes that fixed on Roman when he spoke, as if he were saying something interesting. Something she mightn’t already know. Although she knew a lot. She was the cleverest girl in the class. The cleverest person. And still she looked at Roman when he spoke as if it might be interesting, whatever it was he was going to say. They walked home from school together: Meadhbh and Adam and Roman. They lived close enough to each other so it made sense but it was more than that, Roman felt. It was like he was part of something. Like the basketball team the three of them were on.
‘Are you not too short for basketball?’ Jimmy had asked him.
Roman flushed. He had thought the same thing. ‘You are still growing, Roman,’ Mama had said. She rooted out a photograph album, pointed to photographs of her father, her brother. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The Matus family produce tall men, see?’
He wanted to ask how tall his father had been, but he didn’t. Nobody ever talked about Roman’s father. Not Babcia, not Uncle Lech, not his aunts. Roman’s father was the blank space on the forms his mother filled out.
Coach put Roman on the wing. She said that height wasn’t the only thing that made you a good basketball player. Speed and stamina were important too.
That was another of the good things that had happened.
‘It’s football you should be at,’ Jimmy told him. ‘You’d make a ton of money and have the women crawlin’ all over you.’ Roman didn’t want women crawling all over him. He wanted to shoot the winning basket in the final against St Michael’s who almost always won the inter-schools league. To be named man of the match and have the team carry him off the court on their shoulders the way they’d done to Adam that time.
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