A great kiss.
‘What the fuck took ya?’ the man – a skinny affair with pockmarks denting the drawn skin of his face – hissed at Roman when he appeared beside him.
Roman was used to this reaction. They always looked like they’d been waiting ages.
Roman put his hand out for the money. ‘Always get the money first,’ Jimmy said. ‘Those fuckers’ll fleece ya if ya give them half a chance.’
The man’s smile was gappy, like a kid’s, and the teeth that remained had a stained, listing quality, as if they weren’t staying long.
‘Listen, tell Jimmy I’ll pay him double the next time, I’m having a ... bit of a cash-flow situation ...’
Roman shook his head, took a step back. This sometimes happened. Jimmy would be angry. The tip of his nose would turn white and pinched. He’d look around the room for something to throw. The man made a grab for Roman. Roman dodged him like he was on the basketball court, dodging his mark. Then he ran as if he were running towards the opposition’s basket, stuffing the packet back into the pocket of his hoodie. The man ran after him for a minute, then stopped, bent low with his hands on his knees, his breathing loud and wheezy. Roman kept running. He ran until he reached Meadhbh’s house, then he stopped. He knew he should keep running until he got to Jimmy’s. Jimmy’d be waiting for him. He wouldn’t be happy when he heard.
Instead, Roman stopped outside Meadhbh’s house. He thought about the game of dares. If it had started yet. He still had that strange sense of certainty. Of being in charge of his life. He would insist Jimmy pay him. Pay him anyway, no matter what had happened. Roman had kept up his end of the deal. It wasn’t his fault things hadn’t worked out, was it?
The front door of Meadhbh’s house opened and two people came out holding hands, darting towards the side passage where some privacy was granted by way of two potted bay trees, one at either side. Roman crept up the driveway, using the Range Rover as cover. It was a boy and a girl. He could make out their silhouettes. The girl leaned against the side of the house and the boy pinned her there with his arms on either side of her, his hands spread against the brickwork. Then he cocked his head at a curious angle and swooped towards her face. Roman heard the kiss rather than saw it. It made a wet smack of sound. It did not sound like a good kiss. Certainly not a great kiss. When the boy came up for air, the girl giggled and that’s when Roman knew.
It was Meadhbh.
And Adam.
Adam and Meadhbh.
Roman didn’t go back to the party. Meadhbh would return his jacket to him on Monday morning at school. He knew she would. By then everyone would know. About Meadhbh and Adam. Going together. Meadhbh would say that she and Roman were still friends but everything would be different. Adam would have a special signal he would give to Roman when he wanted to be alone with Meadhbh, which would be pretty much all the time, Roman knew. He knew that because if Meadhbh was his girlfriend he’d want to be alone with her pretty much all the time.
He ran home, wasn’t even breathless when he got there. He felt like he could run the length and breadth of Ireland and not be out of breath. Like there was an energy inside him and if he didn’t keep moving, he might explode with it.
‘How’d it go?’ Jimmy asked. Roman wasn’t even afraid of telling him about the deal. He didn’t care about Jimmy and the tantrum he was about to throw. It was only when he reached inside the pocket of his hoodie and realised that the packet was no longer there that fear began to make its presence felt, wrapping itself around his body like the tentacles of that enormous jellyfish that had stung him last summer.
Jimmy didn’t have a tantrum.
He didn’t shout.
Or throw anything against a wall.
He remained in his seat. He didn’t look at Roman. When he spoke, his voice was low and soft.
‘You fucken owe me, Roman. You owe me big time.’
Roman nodded. He knew. ‘How much?’ he asked.
Jimmy leaned forward, close enough for Roman to see the network of red veins threaded through the whites of his eyes. He shook his head. ‘You owe me, Roman,’ he said again, as if Roman hadn’t heard him the first time. ‘I’ll let you know when it’s payback time, yeah?’
‘But I—’ Roman knew that payback for Jimmy always involved interest. A lot of it.
Jimmy pointed a long nicotine-stained finger towards Roman’s face and Roman tried not to flinch. Tried not to look afraid. ‘Shut. The. Fuck. Up.’ Jimmy was doing that thing he did with his voice sometimes. Talking low, almost a whisper. Smiling as he talked, as if he was saying something funny.
Now the smiley-winning-lottery-numbers man who must be the judge but didn’t look like a judge was talking and Roman struggled to concentrate.
‘ ... no option but to recommend that this young man remain in custody until such time as ...’
Mama didn’t cry. Instead, he heard the scrape of her chair against the floor, the pitch of her voice, louder than usual. ‘I want to go with my son,’ she said. It was like a declaration, the way she said it, an order, and he knew what it would have cost her to stand up and announce herself like that. To draw attention to her pale face and red eyes and the fear that shrouded her like a veil.
Roman was pulled to his feet by the guards on either side of him, their hands wrapped around his upper arms. In this way, he was led briskly from the room. From the corner of his eye, he saw Cillian talking to Mama. Heard him saying, ‘Do you understand?’ at the end, speaking slower than he normally would, probably because of his Donegal accent. But she understood a lot now. Since she’d started those English lessons with the old man in the nursing home.
The old man. He was alive, Cillian said at the hearing. Still in a coma. But alive. Roman was glad that the old man knew, at least. That Roman hadn’t shot him. That he had tried to stop Jimmy shooting him.
There was some comfort in that, however small.
Now he was in the back of a police car and there was a wire mesh between him and the two guards in the front and the car was moving, through Swords and then away, leaving Jimmy and school and Meadhbh and Adam and home ... and Mama. Leaving them all behind.
Seventeen
A swirl of the air around his bed as the door opened. He could smell lemon and mint and something else. The woody smell of tobacco.
‘There he is.’ He recognised Joan Larkin’s voice. The sister-in-charge.
‘Oh. He looks ... different than I remembered.’ Tobias could not put a face or a name to the other voice. Low. Feminine.
‘He’s lost weight.’
‘Do you think he’ll ...?’
The sound of window blinds being adjusted. Perhaps opened. Or closed. Tobias couldn’t tell.
‘Hard to tell in these cases, Martha. And he’s elderly, which doesn’t help.’
Martha. Tobias remembered the name from a conversation a few days ago. Or perhaps longer? It was getting harder to keep track of time. Almost impossible.
‘I suppose I should ...’
‘You can stay if you like. He doesn’t get visitors. Apart from a Polish woman. Rosa. She works at the nursing home where he lives. Lived.’
‘Is she the one whose son ...?’
‘Roman, yes. He’s in custody. There was a hearing this morning, far as I know.’
‘Cillian mentioned him. He doesn’t think the boy—’
‘Well, you know Cillian. Always ready to believe the best of people.’
The silence that followed Joan’s statement was, Tobias felt, full of something. Not quite awkwardness but, certainly, there was little ease in it.
He could hear Martha rummage in her handbag, the crackle of foil as she eased a – he could smell the mint, stronger now – chewing gum? Yes, chewing gum, into her mouth. He imagined her there, not quite looking at Joan, concentrating on the chewing of the gum to ease the not-quite-awkward silence.
Martha stayed where she was, after Joan left, standing near the door. He could hear her shifting on her feet, could h
ear her hand working its way through her hair. Long, he thought. Tangled.
‘Oh, fuck it.’ Strangely, the expletive did not offend him in the usual way. Possibly because of his ... situation. This feeling of suspension, of floating in a tide that was going out. Or maybe it was the way the word slid from her mouth, something habitual and matter-of-fact about it.
She dragged a chair near the head of his bed and sat down. Silence then, apart from her fidgety breath.
‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. The thump of a bag against the floor. Too heavy for a handbag. Perhaps one of those computer bags. All the young people carried them nowadays, their backs and shoulders bowed with the weight. She was stretching now. He could hear the muscles in her neck and back pull and strain.
A long sigh then. Something resolute about it. The moan of the chair beneath her, the pull of a zip, rummaging, the chair moaning again. A pause and then the scratch of a pencil on paper, which he found confusing – what was she doing? And why was she doing it here? – but comforting also, reminding him as it did of the time he had spent skating the pared tip of a pencil across a page. He had never felt more present in the world than when he was drawing. There were times when he did not feel deserving of such a feeling, for it was a good feeling, close to happiness, he was certain. But it gripped him like an addiction, and he had no choice but to keep drawing. It was something he could not help.
He did not think Martha was drawing. It was slower, more deliberate. He thought she might be writing. He did not wonder what she might be writing. Instead, he concentrated on the sound of the pencil, the soft rub of it against the paper and he imagined it as a lullaby, like the ones his mother used to sing to baby Greta, who listened as she struggled to keep her eyes open.
She always fell asleep in the end.
Tobias followed the sound, saw it as a path he was walking along, down, down, down, the path leading to the place in his mind where he kept her.
He dreamed of Mary Murphy.
It was the smell that Tobias remembered most when he arrived back in Dresden. A dense, acrid smell that clung to his clothes, his hair, crawled under his nails, his skin. The streets of the city were filled with rubble and vague possibilities of people. Bits of people. Tobias was careful not to step on them. He wandered rather than walked. He had no destination; there was no place for him to go. In the Altmarkt, a bonfire of bodies burned, the heat from the flames almost impossible to contemplate as more and more bodies were collected on wooden handcarts and thrown on the blaze.
The zoo had been bombed and someone said there were lions roaming the streets. Tobias wondered what it would be like to see a lion emerging through the thick clouds of smoke that hung like curtains across the city. He thought he would like to see one. He wandered through the streets but saw no lions.
He had no memory of how he felt as he roamed through the city that had been home. Now, home was just a word. A mythical word that came from one of the stories Mama had read to him when he was a child. He was a ghost, haunting a place that was no longer there.
A truck pulled up alongside Tobias. The passenger door opened and a boy, not much older than Tobias, wearing a Luftwaffenhelfer uniform jumped down. He pointed to the back of the truck. ‘Get in,’ he said.
Tobias did as he was bid. In a way, it was a relief to have an order to follow, a place to go.
The truck was crammed with other boys just like him, with blackened faces and deadened eyes. Tobias squeezed himself between two of them and felt the pain in his fingers as they began to thaw with the heat of so many bodies so close together.
The boys discussed where they were going. Most thought they were being sent to the Russian front. Someone knew for a fact that the Red Army was only thirty-five miles north of Berlin now. That created a momentary pause. They had all heard the stories about the Russians.
They took no prisoners.
Tobias said nothing. He closed his eyes but did not sleep. He found himself unable to care where the truck was going, only that it was going. Leaving Dresden in its wake.
He was flotsam, borne on a tide that was neither ebbing nor filling. Just moving. Perhaps west to the allied front. Perhaps north to be thrown to the Russians.
All Tobias knew for sure was that he would never return to Dresden.
The truck stopped every so often. The boys jumped out, pissed in hot arcs at the side of the road, spat their phlegmy spits. Tobias, who had never travelled this far out of Dresden before, looked at the landscape. At the white glare of the frozen fields, separated by lines of trees, their bare branches reaching towards the sky like hands begging for mercy.
He did not know where they were when the attack happened. Or how long they had been driving. Perhaps a day. Perhaps longer. The drone of an airplane, faint at first. The truck swerved towards the side of the road, flinging the boys against the canvas wall like stones from a slingshot. The driver shouted at the boys – Get out, get out – and they piled out of the truck and ran blindly in all directions as the plane, low now, strafed the truck, the road, the fields.
Tobias ran and, when one of the bullets made its mark, there was something close to relief in it. When he fell, he fell in slow motion. He could no longer hear the screams of the other boys. He remembered the sensation of air, rushing past his face. He remembered thinking it was not unpleasant, the sensation. He lay where he fell. The road was cold against his skin but the blood running down his face was warm. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, a face was hovering over his. It was her face.
What Tobias remembered most about Mary Murphy was her eyes. Dark blue. Almost navy. She was hovering above him and, at first, he thought perhaps he was dead and she was an angel.
‘Leave him, he’s a fucking Nazi.’
She turned and shouted over her shoulder. ‘He’s only a boy. If we leave him here to die, we’ll be just like them. And this war will make even less sense.’
‘We don’t have room for him.’
‘We’ll make room.’
She half-carried, half-dragged him to a makeshift ambulance. He remembered her arms around him, the warm, sweet smell of her sweat as she pulled and pushed him. He wanted to tell her to leave him be. But the sensation of being borne by her, the feel of her arms wrapped around him, was something he had no power to resist.
When Tobias came to, he was in a bed, one of many beds arranged in rows with sheets strung around some of them. Later, Tobias realised that the soldiers in those beds were dying. Nearly dead. And he was glad, then, about the sheets.
‘Don’t say anything.’ That’s what Mary Murphy said to him. That first day, when he came to. ‘The soldiers won’t know you’re a German if you don’t say anything, alright?’ Her face was beside his; she was whispering as she changed the bandage around his head. ‘The bullet only grazed you,’ she told him. ‘You’ll be grand before you’re twice married.’ When she laughed, she closed her eyes. He looked at her face. He thought he’d never seen such a beautiful face. The clear softness of her skin, the shape of her mouth, the slender line of her jaw.
‘Don’t cry, love,’ she whispered to him. ‘It’ll be OK.’ He was ashamed to feel the hot leak of tears from the corners of his eyes. He blinked them away.
He said nothing. He slept deep, dreamless sleeps. He ate his rations and did not ask about the other boys in the truck. What had happened to them.
The nights were the worst. Men, stoic in the daylight, whimpering in their sleep, calling out for their mothers, screaming as they saw, again and again, the horrors of the war they had been fighting, perhaps wondering what it had all been for.
In spite of this, Tobias felt something close to calm for the first time since the bombs had dropped on Dresden.
It was because of Mary Murphy. Every day he listened for the soft step of her shoes as she made her way along the beds. Held his breath as she drew near. He pictured her face before he saw it. Closed his eyes and saw her there. She slipped her hand around the back of his
head, lifted him so he could drink the water from the cup she held with her other hand.
‘There now,’ she said, as she returned his head to the pillow. ‘There now.’ Her voice was a whisper, brushing against his ear. He could listen to her forever.
He listened to her stories, memorised them so he could take them out later when she was gone, listen all over again. The things she told him felt like a secret between them, never to be told.
Even though Tobias never spoke, he felt like she was the only person in the world who knew him. Knew he was there. That he existed.
When she removed the stitches in his head, he knew it was only a matter of time.
‘This might hurt,’ she said. There were so many things he wanted to say. To tell her. How she had given him back something of himself that he’d thought was lost forever. How she was the best part of his day. Of every day.
He said nothing.
He would regret it.
Every day.
Eighteen
On Monday night, Cillian drove to Joan’s house, where he and Stella were expected for dinner. Stella was still talking. Now something about another of her sisters. Saoirse, he thought. A papier-mâché love heart her husband had made her for their first wedding anniversary. He’d presented it to her at the party they threw to celebrate. The party that Stella had missed the night she’d arrived. That seemed like a long time ago. Cillian now knew that paper was the traditional gift for one-year wedding anniversaries. ‘ ... and he painted it in the Donegal colours – you know the way she’s mad about the GAA? I asked him how long it had taken him to do and he said ...’
The car was stuffy – Stella liked the heat up high – and Cillian pulled at the tie around the collar of the shirt that Stella had bought him. The damn thing was like a noose, strangling him. He tried to concentrate on Stella’s voice. ‘ ... and Saoirse decided that, from now on, she’d try to visit her mother-in-law every second Friday, even though the nursing home is on the far side of Killybegs but then Selene suggested ...’
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