“So everyone says. She’s taken a shine to you already.”
“You think?”
“Oh, yes.” Marie smiled. “She’s a love-or-hate kind of girl. She loves dogs and she hates cats. She loves peas and she hates carrots. With people, it’s one or the other, but I think you’ve got on her good side. That was a wise move, complimenting her jumping skills. You’ll have a friend for life.”
“Where’s her father now?” Fegan asked.
“Oh, he’s around somewhere,” Marie said. “Sends her money at Christmas. Other than that, we haven’t heard from him in years.”
“It must be hard, managing on your own,” he said.
Ellen waited at the corner of Eglantine Gardens for the adults to take her across the road. Fegan felt something flutter inside when she took his hand instead of her mother’s.
“Sometimes it is,” Marie said as they crossed. “But we’re better off without him.”
Ellen didn’t release his hand when they reached the other side. She kept his index and middle fingers gripped in her small fist and he wanted to tell her to let go, she didn’t know where his hands had been. She would find flecks of old blood in the tiny creases of her fingers if she held his hand too long. He was sure of it.
“I do all right at the paper,” Marie continued, “And I can work from home most days, so I don’t have to spend too much on childcare, especially now she’s started school. Jack knew what I sacrificed for him, and he betrayed me anyway. Ellen doesn’t need a man who’d do something like that. Neither do I.”
, Fegan thought. Marie seemed to read it on his face. Her smile faltered and she looked straight ahead.
They walked in silence to the Malone Road, and turned north towards Queen’s University. This part of the city was alien to Fegan, a million miles away from the Belfast he knew. Grand residences and private clinics lined the Malone Road, guarded by high walls with electric gates.
“Did you go to Queen’s?” Fegan asked.
“No, Jordanstown,” Marie said. “I used to come to the Students’ Union here, though. That was a long time ago, but it hasn’t changed much. Did you go to university?”
She realised it was a foolish question.
Fegan shrugged. “I never quite got around to it,” he said.
She nodded. “What about in the Maze? Did you study anything there?”
“Woodwork,” Fegan said. “A lot of the boys got degrees. Politics, history, that sort of thing. They got a better education there than they ever did at the Christian Brothers. I was never much for studying. I do better with my hands. My father was a carpenter, so I thought I’d give that a go.”
“Are you any good?” Marie asked.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I had a good teacher.”
Her head tilted. “Tell me about him.”
Fegan saw that expression on her face again. The same one she had worn in her car the day before, the same one the prison psychologists like Dr Brady speared him with when they wanted him to spill his guts. Lorries and buses rumbled along the Malone Road. They approached the iron fences of Methodist College. The boarding school’s windows burned orange as the sun ebbed. Fegan battled within himself, part of him wanting to stay hidden, part of him needing to show itself.
He surrendered.
“He was called Ronnie Lennox,” Fegan said. “He was a Prod, from the Loyalist block. He wasn’t a teacher, really, just an auld fella with nothing better to do. It was after my mother died, not long after the Agreement in ’98. I didn’t want to be around the boys any more. I couldn’t listen to them arguing and shouting, so I used to stay behind in the workshop. You could do what you wanted in the Maze, not like a normal prison.
“This one day, there was just me and him and a guard in the workshop. The guard was sleeping in the corner. I was building a cabinet for my cell. I was trying to make the carcass with dovetail joints.” Fegan looked at the scar on his left thumb. “I cut myself and Ronnie came over, cleaned it, put a plaster on me. Then he showed me how to use a coping saw properly. We talked a bit. He coughed all the time; he had asbestos poisoning from the shipyard. He shouldn’t have been in the workshop with all the dust, but he couldn’t stick it in the Loyalist block. He loved to show you stuff. You started him talking about joints and dowels, you’d never get him stopped.”
Fegan noticed Marie’s amused expression. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, her face glimmering. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you really smile, that’s all.”
Fegan coughed. “Guitars were Ronnie’s thing. He played beautiful. Not like those guys in the pubs, banging out the same old songs, but really playing it. Like he was talking to you.”
He caught himself making shapes in the air with his free hand and dropped it to his side. “A couple of the guards had sons who played. They used to bring their guitars in for him to work on. He could take a cheap plank and make it play like it cost a grand.”
“Where is he now?” Marie asked.
“Dead,” Fegan said. “The asbestos finished him. The fluid in his lungs. He would have got out two weeks later.”
“Christ,” Marie said. “I’m sorry.”
Fegan shrugged. “He always told me about this guitar he had at home. A Martin D-28 from the Thirties - a herringbone, he called it. He said he would fix it up when he got out. That’s what kept him going.
“About a year and a half ago, this woman knocked on my door. She said she was Ronnie’s daughter. She handed me this guitar case, all battered and torn up. She said Ronnie had wanted me to have it, he told her that
