Joe Forrester is already in Byrnes, a suburban pub in neighboring Shankill that doesn’t refuse legal tender on the basis of age. I order a pint of Fürstenberg and the barman doesn’t bat an eyelid, although he’s seen me wave over at Joe and he’s nineteen and six feet tall. It’s a tatty old pub, faded landscapes on beer-stained walls, and we blend into the background, Joe in a biker jacket and Docs and me in a black skirt and tux jacket.
“Hair of the dog,” I say as I take a seat opposite Joe. I down several mouthfuls before I put the glass on the table. Joe takes out his fags, offers me one and then lights both of them with a single match. He lets me take a couple of drags before he says anything.
“So, he made a move on you?”
I nod.
“Are you absolutely sure? Like, you didn’t misread the signs or anything?”
“He put his hand on my leg and he left it there for five minutes.”
I’d stared out the window, conjugating French verbs.
“Yeah, but did he say anything or…?”
“No, but it was no accident. He even changed gears and put it back.”
“But that was it?”
It sounds like nothing, an over-exuberant uncle or the touchy-feely parish priest, but it didn’t feel like nothing.
“Yeah, that was it. For now. I’m sorry he didn’t expose himself to me on our first date. Is that what you were expecting?”
“Ah Jaysis, Lou,” he says. He pulls hard on his cigarette and exhales slowly. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. Imagine what the Guards would say if you told them he touched your leg.”
“Yeah, well, why don’t you imagine how you’d feel if he did that to your girlfriend?”
Joe winces and I wonder if I’ve hit a nerve. I’ve no idea if he has a girlfriend; I haven’t seen him with anyone since he brought me to his debs ball almost a year ago. I’d gone because we’d always got on great and I was flattered to be asked while I was still at school. Of course, we’d ended up getting hammered and having a snog and I’m not sure we’d got past the awkwardness of that before everything fell apart.
“OK, point taken. But even if he had”—he wrinkles his nose—“exposed himself to you, how would you convince anyone that you hadn’t been, you know, leading him on?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I say, and I’d walk out right now if he wasn’t my only ally. “You still don’t believe he forced Tina, do you?”
“I don’t know what to believe, Lou. And I don’t know what I’m capable of believing. Do you know how hard it is to think my sister killed herself because of something I didn’t even know was happening? It was bad enough when we thought she had some mental imbalance or something, but you’ve brought this man into our lives and it’s fucking torturing me, thinking about him.”
He stubs out his cigarette and sinks back into his seat.
“So yeah, I want you to be wrong. There, I’ve said it.”
I suck on the cigarette, buying time to think. I need to work with Joe’s grief, not against it.
“I know how you feel,” I say, “because I feel it too. I was supposed to be her best friend and I didn’t even know until she was already pregnant.”
But that’s not true. I knew he was taking over her life and all I felt was jealousy and resentment that he was stealing her from me. I couldn’t bring myself to think he was touching her, what that might mean for her, for me.
“Did you know she was cutting herself?” asks Joe.
“No.”
Not until that last night when she showed me the scars. The raised welts at the top of her inner thighs that he must have seen every time. Thoughts of Shauna flicker to mind and I try not to think of the thin line on her thigh, only the soft wave of her hair, the upturned curve of her smile. Just knowing I’ll see her on Monday morning is enough of an antidote to the fear that I’ll have to face him too.
“I don’t understand why Tina couldn’t have told someone,” he says.
“He told her she’d never swim again. She was totally under his control.”
He closes his eyes and I feel his anger, deep and raw and open to suggestion.
“Don’t you see what he did? He put her in a position where she had no choice. He had the power to take away the one thing that meant everything to her.”
“So she just let him…”
“No,” I say as I stub my cigarette hard in the ashtray. “He forced her.”
Joe puts his elbows on the table, his head in his hands.
“I want to fucking kill him,” he says.
I leave him with his thoughts until they’ve had enough time to fester.
“Joe, it’s still happening. If he’s trying it on with me already, there must be others.”
He shifts uncomfortably in his chair.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“I dunno, you’re the journalist.”
He laughs. “I’m a second-year student, Lou, not Kate Adie.”
“Couldn’t you do a piece on Highfield? You could write about their Olympic chances and that would give you a reason to talk to the swimmers? Maybe him too?”
“I dunno,” he says, but as he taps the bottom of his cigarette packet I can see he’s thinking about this new angle, the one where he’s a hero instead of an aggrieved relative.
“You told me ages ago you wanted to write about sport,” I say.
“Yeah, football and rugby, not the personal lives of swimming coaches.”
He takes two cigarettes out of the packet, but I wave mine away.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I say. “Everyone acting like it’s none of their business.”
“I don’t know, Lou. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“So it’s OK to turn a blind eye?”
There’s a darkness in his eyes then, a resignation more than a realization.
“Yeah, Lou, I get it. I’ll think about it. But don’t get your hopes up, OK?”
“Thanks.”
“If I do anything—and it’s a big if—it’ll be for Tina. Swimming was her life.”
It’s the finality of that last sentence that gets me, that her story has already been written. And I wonder then whose justice I’m after—hers, or mine.
ON MONDAY, I’M HARDLY IN the door from school when Mam’s on my case, the bag in the hall, the dishes in the sink. She’s clearly in one of her moods, banging around the kitchen, and I can’t work it out. She hasn’t been drinking—I can always tell, even when she denies it—and it’s too early in the day for a hangover. I tread carefully up the stairs to my room, taking my bag with me.
There are two things that start the slow spiral into despair in this house: men and money. There are no boyfriends lurking in the shadows and I thought we were ticking along financially. Mam’s even been giving me pocket money since she encouraged me to leave my job as lounge girl at the Black Swan. In fact, it’s the first time in years we’ve had a break from the endless cycle of counting and pinching.
When the girls at school moan about being poor, all they mean is their allowance isn’t due for a few days or they haven’t enough to buy the Patrick Cox shoes they want. They’re not watching the electricity meter, measuring out the days until the next dole payment or wage packet. Mam always has an eye and a hand out for a bargain, even when she’s pouring the savings down her throat. It’s the reason we’ve never had anything as unpredictable as a car or a pet, why it’s so important to her that I do well at Highfield and go to college.
It’s the path that was laid out for her, until she could no longer hide her pregnancy. In her first term at university, she was sent to England with a cover story about a sick aunt. She was expected to return with empty arms but, once she held me, she couldn’t give me away. She walked away from a family that didn’t want to know me, from the money and stability she’d always taken for granted.
What Mam sacrificed for herself, she holds tight for me, that hunger to improve. I’ve always felt it, the certainty that there’s more than this estate and signing on and cash-in-hand, week-to-week work. Sister Mullen has been feeding that notion, chipping away at the rhythm of my accent and language, and I try it all out on Mam to see what I can get away with. Yesterday, I complimented her spaghetti Bolognese as “utterly glorious” and, after she made sure I wasn’t slagging her, she replied that it was her “absolute pleasure.” We laughed, a solidarity in our softly shifting voices.
I’m lying on my bed, counting the rings of damp on the ceiling, when Mam pushes the door open.
“Can I come in?”
“OK.”
She stoops to pick up the discarded clothes on the floor and I groan.
“Mam, would you leave it?”
“Well, somebody has to do it.”
“I’ll do it, OK, just stop.”
She hangs the clothes on the back of a chair and sits on the edge of my single bed.
“I want to talk to you about something,” she says. “I’ve taken on some more shifts at the Swan.”
I roll onto my side to face her, the draft from the window cold against my neck.
“And I was thinking maybe it’s time for you to get your old job back.”
I’m up on my elbow now, alarm bells in my ears.
“But you said I needed to concentrate on my studies. What’s changed?”
“Things are…” She looks out the window with tired eyes. “Money’s just a lot tighter than I thought.”
My heart sinks at the thought of working evenings on a school night, giving up hockey on a Saturday.
“I’m sorry, love,” she says. “I’m going to have to look at other ways to raise money too.”
“Like what?”
“We could take in a lodger.”
“We’ve only got two bedrooms.”
“You could move into my room.”
“I will in my hole,” I say as the full horror of it dawns on me. She’s never made this threat before, no matter how bad things have been. I try to stifle my anger but it’s already hurtling out of me.
“What have you done?”
Mam puts her head in her hands, and she’s shaking, maybe even crying, but I’m not letting her get away with this.
“Tell me,” I shout, sitting up now, inches away from her.
“Ah Jesus, Lou,” she says, her breath catching between sobs. “I’ve borrowed some money, that’s all.”
There’s a tightness in my chest and I almost don’t want to ask the next question, let her deal with it herself, but it’s never that simple.
“You didn’t borrow it from Kenny O’Kane, did you?”
She doesn’t need to answer; I can hear it in her silence, see it between the fingers still clinging to her face.
“Fuck,” I roar. “How could you be so stupid?”
I think of the easy pocket money, how eager I was to go along with it, how I should have known better.
“How much?” I ask, and her hands slide down her wet cheeks, the fight gone out of her.
“Only a couple of hundred. It was all fine until he started increasing the payments.”
“But you know that’s what he does. How many people round here have you seen fall into his trap? Mam, how could you do this to us?”
The tears are rolling down her face and I know she wants me to reach out and tell her it’ll be OK, like I always do. But I can barely breathe with it all—Tina, Highfield, McQueen and now Kenny O’fucking Kane too. I lie back onto the pillow and stare at the dirty brown rings on the ceiling until she lets herself out and closes the door behind her.