He practised shooting hoops for hours after school the week leading up to the final. On the day of the match, he walked home from school to get his gear that Mama had washed the night before and draped over the radiator in their room. She’d said it would be dry by the time he got home from school.
Jimmy’s motorbike was parked outside that day. That meant Uncle Lech was home. Lech often came home in the middle of the afternoon when Mama was at work. Roman presumed it was because he was the boss and could do what he liked. He hoped his uncle wouldn’t be in one of his moods.
Jimmy had already opened the front door by the time Roman reached for the lock with his key. He smiled when he saw Roman. ‘Ah, Romeo, how’s tricks?’ he said.
Jimmy called him Romeo. It was because of Meadhbh. Jimmy thought Meadhbh was Roman’s girlfriend. Adults always thought girls were your girlfriend. Jimmy looked like one of those adults who didn’t realise they were an adult. He had long brown hair to his shoulders and a line of studs up his ear, one at the edge of his eyebrow and another on the side of his nose. He had a tattoo of a falcon coiled around his arm, the head of it huge against the swell of his upper arm muscle. Roman had only seen it once, ages ago. Jimmy didn’t usually take off his leather jacket when he visited Uncle Lech. He didn’t stay long enough.
‘Hi, Jimmy.’
‘Don’t go disturbing your uncle, won’t you not? He’s having a bit of a lie-down.’
Roman shook his head. ‘I won’t.’
His gear smelled of washing powder. He folded it and unzipped his sports bag. Inside, Mama had packed a banana, a bottle of water, a chocolate bar and a piece of paper. Roman unfolded it. Powodzenia! it said. She signed the note as she always did: ściskam mocno. The English translation was even more embarrassing: I’m hugging you tight.
Still, he tucked the piece of paper into the zip pocket of his hoodie – a lucky charm – and checked his watch. Three o’clock. Plenty of time.
He stood at the kitchen counter, drank a pint of milk and ate half a packet of Hobnobs. Mama said he was like a leaky bucket: she could never fill him. He put the empty glass in the dishwasher, swept the crumbs up with his hands and threw them in the bin. Lech said he didn’t expect Mama to clean the duplex. He said they could get a cleaner, but Mama said she didn’t like the idea of a stranger in their home. Roman didn’t have to do chores, she said. She wanted him to concentrate on his schoolwork. ‘I have high hopes for you, my Roman.’
Later, he told the police that he didn’t go looking for Lech because Lech was in his bedroom and he didn’t like to be disturbed when he was in his bedroom. He didn’t tell them about the sound he heard, just before he left. A bump. Or a bang, perhaps. Like Lech had dropped something, maybe. The dull thud of a book. Except that Lech didn’t read books. Roman heard the sound, stopped for a moment, then continued on his way. He picked up his bag, wiped the milk off his top lip with the back of his hand and shouted, ‘Seeya,’ up the stairs. Perhaps Lech had said, ‘Seeya,’ back but the sound was lost in the crash of the front door closing behind him.
His mother always said he’d pull that door off its hinges some day.
The match was cancelled in the end. The minibus bringing the team from the school in Drogheda had been involved in a traffic accident and some of the players had to go to hospital for check-ups and observation. Nothing serious, their coach said. Just a precaution.
Roman walked home with Adam and Meadhbh. He kicked a stone all the way. ‘The match is only postponed, Roman. We’ll play it another day,’ Meadhbh said.
‘I know.’ Roman liked things to happen when they were supposed to happen. Mama said that he had always been like that. Even as a baby, feeding every three hours, on the hour, two burps after a handful of gentle pats on the back.
‘Let’s get a bag of chips,’ said Adam, who punctuated most of his activities – piano, scouts, swimming, tae kwan do – with food of one kind or another. It was a testament to these activities that he wasn’t the size of a house. Or a duplex.
Roman was about to say yes to the chips, even though Mama had cooked an enormous curry last night and there was more than enough left for dinner. He could hear the two euros Jimmy had handed him before he left – a bit of courtin’ money for the young squire – jingling in his pocket and he thought that hot, salty chips, crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, might dampen the disappointment of the cancelled – postponed – match. But then his phone rang and he answered it and it was Mama and she was crying.
Adam’s mother drove him to the hospital. It took ages to get there, with the traffic and the rain that had begun a dreary, insistent onslaught on the day. Adam sat in the back with him but didn’t say anything. It was never easy to get a word in when Adam’s mother was around.
‘I’m sure your uncle will be just fine,’ she said, her eyebrows scarcer than usual after her Friday-morning trip to the beauty salon. ‘Your poor mother. She must have gotten a terrible shock when she found him.
‘And he’s a young man still, isn’t he, Roman? He couldn’t be more than thirty-five, surely? I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’ll be right as rain.’
Roman did his best not to think about that day. He certainly never spoke about it. Not even to Mama. Especially not Mama. Her face was hard to look at, afterwards.
The police were involved because of the cocaine. They wanted to know where Lech got it. Roman thought about the small brown-paper packages he sometimes saw Jimmy slip to Lech before he opened the front door and left.
Roman said nothing.
He told Adam’s mother, when she asked, that it had been a heart attack. Sudden and huge. He wouldn’t have felt a thing. That’s what Mama told Babcia when she rang her. She didn’t mention the cocaine either. The overdose.
Everything was different when they got back from the funeral. It was in Puck, the funeral. Babcia said Mama had to bring her boy home. Said it was the least that she could do. She never called him Lech. She said, My boy. Mama said he was her mother’s favourite and Roman thought that was true. It didn’t seem to bother Mama. It was just one of those facts.
Mama nodded when Babcia talked about her boy’s entrepreneurial spirit, his sense of adventure, his courage, his kindness and strength. She didn’t tell Babcia about the lapsed health insurance policy and Lech leaving nothing behind him only debt. She nodded and made pots of coffee and poured careful measures of vodka into neighbours’ glasses. She picked out a headstone and arranged to pay it off month by month. ‘If it were you we were burying, my boy would write a cheque,’ Babcia said.
Mama nodded again.
Everyone said Roman was like him. Like Lech. But Roman was never going to be like him.
A drug addict.
A loser.
Mama slapped Roman’s face the day he said that. The day after they came back from Poland. They stood outside the duplex with their bags packed. Mama pushed the keys into the letterbox. Mortgage payments. There was another thing Uncle Lech had forgotten to do.
It was the only time she’d ever hit him. The noise was a sharp crack and, for a while afterwards, the outline of her fingers was red, across the side of his face.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Oh, my Roman, I’m so sorry.’ She put her arms around him and cried into the side of his head. Her tears dripped along the edge of his ear, made it itch. He wondered then why they had come back to Ireland after the funeral. They had nowhere to live, Mama had no job and the man with the sour face in the dole office told her that there would be no dole money coming her way because it turned out that Uncle Lech had forgotten to give the tax she had paid to whoever he was supposed to give tax to.
But Babcia didn’t know any of that. Perhaps that was why they came back. Mama didn’t want her to know any of that.
They stayed in a B&B for four nights while Mama looked for jobs and Roman went back to school and didn’t tell Adam or Meadhbh about the duplex and the cocaine and the catering company that didn’t seem to be a company anymore, jus
t a lot of money owed to a collection of different people.
Then Jimmy came to visit. To pay his respects, he said.
The door of their bedroom in the B&B was ajar when Roman returned from school. Roman stopped at the door. Listened. He could hear Jimmy’s voice. Not his usual voice. This one was low and sort of slithery, like the way Roman had imagined Voldemort’s snake, Nagini, talked. Through the gap between the hinges, Roman saw them. Jimmy and his mother. Rosa’s back was pressed against the door of the wardrobe and Jimmy stood in front of her, much too close, the tip of his forefinger tracing a line along her collar bone that jutted from the edge of the V-neck T-shirt she wore.
‘ ... can come to some understanding, I’m sure,’ Roman heard Jimmy say in his snake voice.
Roman shoved open the door and the handle banged against the wall, a loud thump, making Jimmy jump, swing around. Rosa sidled away, moved towards Roman.
‘Are you alright, Mama?’ said Roman. He felt the force of his pulse beating at the back of his throat. He clenched his fists.
Jimmy spread his hands. ‘Of course she is, son. Your pretty Mama and I were talking about the future. Weren’t we, darling?’ He looked at Rosa who nodded. Then he turned to Roman again. When Jimmy smiled, he looked like the front window of a jeweller’s shop, with all the gold caps he had.
‘And,’ Jimmy went on, ‘we’ve come up with a great idea. Haven’t we, Rosa?’ Another nod from Rosa. Jimmy stretched his arm out, clasped his hand around Rosa’s slight shoulder. ‘And don’t you be worrying your pretty little head about paying a deposit, Rosa. As I said, I’m sure we can come to some arrangement, you and I.’
Mama said, ‘No,’ real quick and then, after a pause, she said, ‘There’s no need, I mean. We can pay,’ in a voice that Roman could barely hear.
They moved into Jimmy’s spare room the next day. Rosa got herself first one job, then another, and another and the first two things she paid every week were the rent and as much as she could off what Lech owed Jimmy. Four hundred euros a month for the room. The other bedrooms in the house were occupied by Jimmy himself and a couple that Jimmy said was hardly ever there. ‘They work round the clock,’ he told Rosa and Roman. ‘Foreigners too. I’d say they’re from Poland.’
They were Lithuanians.
At night, Mama dragged their suitcase against the door, jammed it under the handle. Jimmy said Rosa could store the case in the attic but she said, no. No, thank you. She told Roman they wouldn’t be staying long; just long enough for them to get square with Jimmy. To get back on their feet.
Four hundred euros. Jimmy said it was bargain basement. Roman saw Mama count it out on the floor in their room. The last tenner came from the jar of coins she kept in the wardrobe. Roman organised the coins into groups of five, ten, twenty and fifty cents, then built towers out of them until he made it to ten euro.
Jimmy was often in the kitchen when Roman arrived home from school. The air was blue with smoke. Sometimes, he offered Roman a cigarette.
‘Ah, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore fart thou, Romeo?’ Jimmy thought this was funny. Roman smiled when he said it because, well, it was Jimmy’s house and, even though it wasn’t nearly as nice as the duplex, Rosa told him to be nice to Jimmy. To be polite.
‘But don’t talk to him more than you have to. Make sure you do your homework. And you’re to eat your dinner in our room,’ Mama told him. ‘OK?’
Roman didn’t like eating upstairs in their room. The smell of food lingered for ages. At least in the kitchen there was somewhere to sit other than a bed. In the kitchen, you felt like you were eating a meal. In the room, it was just trying not to get crumbs on the sheets.
And sometimes Jimmy was nice. Like that time he took Roman to see the new Avengers film. Roman had seen the ads for it but he didn’t mention the cinema anymore. Not since the coin towers.
He told Adam and Meadhbh that he’d already seen whatever film they asked him to go to now. ‘You must spend your entire life in the cinema,’ Adam had said, a look of naked admiration on his face. Meadhbh didn’t say anything.
He went to the cinema with Jimmy in the end. He knew he shouldn’t have. Mama would have been angry if she’d found out.
Still. He went. He somehow knew Jimmy wouldn’t mention it to Rosa.
Mama managed to get a kitchen porter job in the Moon & Stars pub at lunchtimes. Early mornings, cleaning in Penneys. A few evening shifts at a nursing home. And in between, a handful of cleaning jobs in some houses in the area.
Roman told Adam and Meadhbh that he’d moved house. Like it was no big deal. And he said that he hated the food in the school canteen and that was why he brought a packed lunch every day now. Everything was different now. Still, life went on. Mama said that no matter what happened, life went on.
It just kept going on and on.
Roman must have fallen asleep eventually because he was awoken by a knocking sound, outside the barn. At first, he thought he was in his room in Jimmy’s house. There was someone knocking on the front door which was weird because there was a bell so why weren’t they ringing it?
Roman sat up, pulled a piece of straw out of his hair, rubbed his eyes. Through the gaps between the roof of the barn and the walls, he could see the light of day struggling to make an impact on the sky. His first feeling was one of relief. That the night was behind him.
The knocking noise wasn’t a knocking noise at all. It was more like a hammering sound. The strike of a hammer against wood. It sounded close.
All of a sudden, it stopped and the silence that came in its stead was like a ringing in Roman’s ears. He strained towards it. Now he could hear someone breathing.
Roman lifted the overcoat off him and stood up, careful not to make a sound. He steadied himself with a hand on the edge of one of the wooden stalls. His clothes felt stiff with damp, his jacket and jeans heavy on his body. He thought, if he wasn’t so cold he’d feel hungry. The last thing he’d eaten was the porridge that Mama had left for him in the kitchen yesterday morning. That seemed like a long time ago now.
There was a small hole in the wall of the barn, big enough to accommodate Roman’s eye. He peered through it and saw the rump of a horse. He blinked and looked again. Yes, it was a horse. A white one, saddled, with mud-spattered legs and a long, untidy mane. Beside the animal, a man crouched low to the ground with a hammer in his hand, which he was using to drive a wooden post into the ground beside a gate that Roman had not noticed last night. The man stood and turned, his face lined with concentration. He stayed in that position, the man, looking towards the barn, as if he could see something there. As if he could see Roman. The boy took a step back and there was a clatter as his foot connected with a bucket – something else he had not noticed the night before – and the thing tipped onto its side, spilling a small mound of dusty oats onto the concrete floor.
The noise was huge. Or so it seemed to Roman.
‘Who’s in there?’ The man’s voice was loud. Almost a shout. The horse whinnied.
The door was yanked open. The man, framed in the doorway, looked bigger now. In one hand, the hammer.
‘What the hell are you doing in my barn, you pup?’
There was a gap between the man’s leg and the edge of the barn. Roman dived through it and felt a tug as the man grabbed the end of his jacket. Now there was shouting and it was hard to tell if it was coming from Roman or the man or maybe both of them. Roman slithered out of his jacket and ran, leaving the man standing there, his jacket in one hand. The horse snorted, stamped his hoof against the ice-hard ground. ‘I’m ringing the police,’ the man roared after him. ‘Trespassing and damaging property. Get back here.’
Roman cleared the gate, ran down a lane that turned into a muddy track. He knew if he stopped he would freeze without the jacket. He knew if he stopped he mightn’t be able to start again. He kept running, didn’t look back to see if the man was behind him.
Oddly, he thought about Meadhbh. The way they used to pick the dandelions that had
gone to seed, blow on their white, fluffy heads and scatter the dried seeds to the wind. He felt like that now. Like one of those seeds he had watched, borne away on the wind.
As a kid, he had wondered where they would end up.
What might happen to them.
He ran.
Seven
When Cillian left, Martha hobbled into the kitchen, turned on the tap, scooped water in the cup of her hand and washed down two ibuprofen. She needed to move, keep busy, distract herself. Get dressed for starters. Go to the hospital, sit outside a meeting, ring the editor to whom she had promised the article yesterday at 4 p.m. She would explain that she had been indisposed and that the indisposition had been outside of her control and that she could send the article by four o’clock this afternoon instead. If the editor thought she’d been drinking, there was nothing Martha could do about that. She hadn’t been drinking. But it had been a close call. Too close. In her head, she could still hear the creak of the door into the Pound pub, swinging open, telling her everything would be alright if only she’d step inside.
She spread her hands on the draining board, closed her eyes, tried to gather herself. Things had been OK. Better than OK. She had spent a long time – much longer than she’d anticipated – carefully rebuilding. For a long time, there had been a scaffolding around her life as she had gone about the business of putting herself back together. And for a while there – a good while – she had been fine. A stand-alone structure. Fortified. And now, all of a sudden, the ground beneath her felt unstable. Tara in hospital. And Cillian. Reappearing all of a sudden. Like the past itself, reaching out to grab her and drag her back.
She straightened, reached for her pouch of tobacco. The routine – rolling the cigarette, lighting it, taking that first, heady drag – helped. And the pain in her body – not yet numbed by the tablets – had its uses. It distracted her. In her head, she made a list. Phone the editor. Drive to the hospital. Sit outside a meeting.
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