Shay looked over from where the kids chose to sit on the Luas and predicted there would be some ‘colour’ any moment.
Molly continued with her Halloween jokes.
‘Why did the skeleton cross the road?’
‘Why, honey?’
‘To go to the body shop.’
Molly beamed, Charlie laughed. Shay managed a smile.
The voices across from them intruded on their moment.
‘Ya know when yer legs do be sore and yer trying to turn,’ the woman shouted, a big gold chain with a cross dangling from her neck.
‘Yeah, yer sore on yer back and on yer fucking side,’ the man beside her said, an unlit rollie in his mouth.
‘Yeah. I was sleeping, right, then I sneezed. I fucking sneezed about fifty fucking times,’ she said.
Shay watched her gesticulate as she spoke, her hands going this way, then that, out of sync with her words.
A jingle rang from a phone. The woman pulled out her mobile.
‘Yeah . . . What?’
‘Tell me another, Molly?’ Shay said, turning to the kids.
But Molly, along with Charlie, was staring at the woman, who was mouthing off.
‘That one,’ the woman shouted, pointing a finger at her phone, ‘she’s a proper cunt. I’m supposed to meet her to get fucking bogey urine off the . . .’
‘Molly, another one?’ Shay said loudly.
‘Why didn’t the ghost go to the party?’
Shay gave her a quizzical look.
‘Don’t know. Why?’
‘Because he had no body to go with.’
Shay sniffed a laugh. Molly and Charlie joined in.
Shay’s thoughts drifted to Lisa. She had wanted them out of the house. She had migraines, bad ones, she told him.
But Shay thought she was preoccupied with something.
Shay leaned back against the wall, his arms folded, transfixed at the painting. Somewhere, he could hear the kids’ silvery voices. He had got them to walk to the museum thanks to a pancake and promises of an ice cream after. That, and the fact it was the museum with the speaking phones, the ones they could type in the painting’s number and hear about it. They loved that.
Shay felt a pull to see the painting again; out of nowhere, just as they crossed the Ha’penny Bridge. Seeing it didn’t make him feel better, as such. But it resonated in ways he couldn’t quite understand.
He pored over Louis le Brocquy’s painting again.
In it, a dad sat at the end of a thin, sharp bed, the right side of his body facing out. He was naked and hunched: his legs and big feet angled awkwardly, his head bowed. He looked forlorn and beaten. The mum shot up from the other end of the bed. Her eyes betrayed a terrible despair, as if the nightmare of her reality was worse than the torment of her dreams. Her right hand gripped the sheet, as if clinging on to sanity.
Shay looked at her and saw Lisa. She hadn’t slept the previous nights because of the bonfires and crowds out drinking on the green. He tried to reassure her: that Halloween time was always like this, that it would pass.
‘It’s been going on since August, and last year it went on up to nearly Christmas,’ she said. ‘I rang the fire brigade yesterday and told them about that huge bonfire and all the toxic stench coming out of it. They told me,’ she laughed bitterly, ‘that they wouldn’t come out because there were a load of kids there and they might be attacked. Can you fucking believe it? Basically, to hell with you people living there.’
The pain in her face pierced Shay’s heart like a long needle. But he needed her to just hang in, for the final stretch.
He had met Hall the previous day and told him about Leo and Ghost. He could tell from Hall that something was cooking. Not that he would tell him what.
Shay sensed Charlie and Molly were now either side of him. Charlie pointed at the child in the painting.
The naked girl, not much older than Charlie, stood at the end of the bed with eerie, uncomprehending eyes. One hand touched her mother’s foot, the other held up a small bunch of pretty flowers, the only colour in A Family.
‘Girl has colour in flowers,’ Charlie said.
‘It’s hope,’ Shay said, clasping his children, ‘in the face of none.’