like sun-kissed water, and made her look at him.
It was the young man from outside the school, the childless man who crossed in front of her and Pete and watched through the railings. He was standing, body casual but the expression on his face curiously intense, staring straight in at her. Under the black tracksuit she could see a flash of green and white. He was wearing a Celtic top.
Unnerved and jittery, she pushed hard on the accelerator, shot straight across the road and into the mouth of a lane, throwing the door open as she pulled the handbrake on, jumping out and looking back.
A bus was between her and the young man but she ran across the road anyway, bolting around the back of it.
She reached the corner no more than five seconds after she’d seen him, but he was gone.
II
The tenements in Kevin’s street were five stories high and in an area so aspiring that every single flat had at least one car. Paddy toured the street twice, looking for a space to stop.
One of the corners looked marginally less illegal than the others and she parked carefully, her car bonnet sticking out into the street. She’d only be ten minutes. Kevin probably wasn’t in anyway, and if he was, all he had to give her was three lines of information. She wasn’t going to take a cup of tea if he offered. She’d get a name, call the police, and go straight back to Pete’s school and pull him out of his class.
Kevin’s close was nicer than she remembered. She’d only seen it in the evening and the dusty forty-watt bulbs didn’t do justice to the green wall tiles. The neighbors had put plants out on the landing and they flourished in the south-facing light coming in through big wire-meshed windows.
Kevin’s door was firmly shut. She rang the bell and waited for a polite length of time before knocking. She could hear the sound of her knuckle raps echo around the empty hall. He wasn’t in. Considering the trouble Michael Collins had taken to frighten her, he might have freaked Kevin out too.
She took a notepad from her pocket and scribbled her number on the back with her name and a request that he call her. She was holding the letter box open to slip it in when she heard the sound of music.
Bending down, she peered through the letter box. She couldn’t see anything: on the other side of the door was a two-sided brush, the bristles coming up and down to meet in the middle, a device designed to stop drafts and nosy people from doing exactly what she was trying to do: looking into the flat. She tried pushing the bristles apart with her fingers but the letter box was too deep and she couldn’t reach. There was definitely music coming from in there, from the living room, she thought.
Kneeling down on the rough doormat, she used her pen and one of her house keys to hold the bristles slightly apart. She could just see in but not much. She put her mouth to the opening.
“Kevin? Are you in?”
He could be sleeping in the living room, using the music to block out morning noises and sounds from the street. She could see the rug on the floor, the foot of a tripod, the chair where he had put her coat on Sunday night.
Shuffling sideways on her knees like a pilgrim, she changed her point of entry: the living-room door was open, sunlight pooled on a discarded trainer lying on its side, the worn sole towards her. The music was coming from there, the cheerful overture to Marriage of Figaro. It sounded like the radio was on.
She was just about to withdraw her eye, to pull back and shout in again, when she saw the toe of the trainer twitch. The trainer had an ankle attached to it.
SIXTEEN. NEGATIVE NEGATIVES
I
The police broke the door down and Paddy followed the paramedics into the flat.
Kevin was in the living room, limp, lying on his left side, his cheek sitting in a pool of dry, chalky saliva. Behind him, bright yellow sunlight flooded the living room, casting a gray shadow over his face. His eyes were open a little, a slice of white. They looked as dry as the saliva under his cheek. His right hand was clamped at his breastbone, the hand clawed tight. He’d had a stroke, they said, almost certainly.
Paddy’s voice was a strangled whisper. “He’s thirty-five. How could he have a stroke?”
The paramedic pointed to the coffee table in the living room. The boxes of negatives had all been moved. It looked strange because it was the only clear surface in the house. Sitting on the smoked-glass surface was a single line of white powder. “Cocaine.”
“Will he be all right?”
“He’ll be fine,” the paramedic said, avoiding her eye.
“You’ll be OK, Kevin,” she said, raising her voice and sounding more frightened than she meant to. “Don’t worry. They’ve said you’ll be OK.”
Paddy stood in the cozy mess of the hall and watched as the ambulance men took Kevin’s vital signs and declared him not dead, yet. One of them touched his fingertips to the chalky mess under his cheek, rubbing it between his fingers. It was gritty, he said; definitely an overdose. They asked if he was a habitual drug user and she said she didn’t really know but didn’t think so: he didn’t even drink anymore. They nodded as if that was exactly what they expected her to say. One of them seemed to be trembling, which alarmed her.
Two police officers stood in the door of the bedroom, talking quietly. Their summer shirts were so starched they looked like blue cardboard. Start of the shift.
Kevin’s hall wasn’t used to having five people in it. They had to pick their steps. He had dropped things as he came home, ran out to meet people, staggered home after a good night out with pals. She looked around, imagined him seeing it and vowing to tidy it on quiet Sundays but having warm lie-ins instead, lingering over his breakfast, listening to the radio or reading a book.
She looked back at him. His left arm was beneath him, the soft inside of his forearm facing upwards. It was blue. A huge blue-and-green bruise covered the skin, deep, a memory of trauma. He hadn’t had it when she saw him on Sunday.
She stepped forward. “That bruise on his arm.” She pointed it out to the ambulance men. “Could he have done that when he fell?”
One of them shrugged, irritated that she had drawn their attention away from their work. “Suppose.”
She tried to imagine a fall that would occasion a bad blow on the inner forearm. And then she noticed it: a matching bruise under his chin. It wasn’t obvious because of the sharp light behind him. A U-shaped bruise, a grip on either side of his chin, holding him tight.
“Excuse me.” She reached forward and touched the ambulance man’s shoulder. “Are you sure it’s a stroke?”
He shook her hand off, angry at being distracted. “Aye, it is. It just is, look at his hand.”
She stepped around Kevin’s feet to get a better look and the ambulance man sighed and glanced back at the police officers. “Can ye…?”
A noise came from deep inside Kevin, a gurgle that seemed to emanate from his stomach. A small bubble of wet formed at his lips and burst.
He was dying. She knew he was dying. One of the officers saw Paddy reel backwards and grabbed her under the arm, turning her away. He took her out to the cold, dark close and encouraged her to catch her breath.
“Is he dead?”
“He’s going to be fine. The paramedics say he’s going to be fine.”
