Broken Harbour

“Not really. I have the others’ phone numbers, but it’s been ages. I should ring them, tell them, but I just… I can’t.”

She brought her mug to her mouth to hide her face. “Leave the numbers with us,” Richie said helpfully. “We’ll do it. No reason you should have to break the news.”

Fiona nodded, without looking at him, and fumbled in her pockets for her phone. Richie ripped a page out of his notebook and passed it to her. As she wrote I asked, moving her back towards safer ground, “It sounds like you were a pretty close-knit bunch. How did you get out of touch?”

“Just life, mostly. Once Pat and Jenny and Conor went to college… Shona and Mac are a year younger than them, and me and Ian are another year, so we weren’t on the same buzz any more. They could go to pubs, and proper clubs, and they were meeting new people at college-and without the three of them, the rest of us just didn’t… It wasn’t the same.” She handed the paper and pen back to Richie. “We all tried-at first we all still saw each other all the time. It was weird because suddenly we had to schedule stuff days in advance and someone was always pulling out at the last minute, but we did hang out. Gradually, though, it just got to be less and less. Even up until a couple of years ago, we still met up for a pint every few weeks, but it just… it stopped working.”

She had her hands wrapped around the mug again, tilting it in circles and watching the tea swirl. The smell of it was doing its job, making this alien place feel homey and safe. “Actually, it probably stopped working a long time before that. You can see it in the photos: we stop being jigsawed together like in that one there, instead we’re just these elbows and knees stuck out at each other, all awkward… We just didn’t want to see it. Pat, especially. The less it worked, the harder he tried. We’d be sitting on the pier or somewhere, and Pat’d be spread out till he was practically stretching, trying to keep close to all of us, make it feel like one big gang again. I think he was proud of it, that he still hung out with the same friends he’d had since he was a kid. That meant something to him. He didn’t want to let it go.”

She was unusual, Fiona: perceptive, acute, sensitive; the kind of girl who would spend a long time alone thinking about something she didn’t understand, picking away at it until the knot unraveled. It made her a useful witness, but I don’t like dealing with unusual people. “Four guys, three girls,” I said. “Three couples and an odd man out? Or just a gang of mates?”

Fiona almost smiled, down at the photo. “A gang of mates, basically. Even when Jenny and Pat started going out, it didn’t change things as much as you’d think. Everyone had seen it coming for ages, anyway.”

I said, “I remember you saying you dreamed about someone loving you the way Pat loved Jenny. The other lads were no prizes, no? You didn’t bother giving it a go with any of them?”

She blushed. The rosiness drove the gray out of her face, turned her young and vivid. For a moment I thought it was for Pat, that he had been filling up the place other boys could have had, but she said, “I actually did. Conor… we went out, just for a while. Four months, the summer I was sixteen.”

Which was practically marriage, at that age. I caught the tiny shift of Richie’s feet. I said, “But he treated you badly.”

The blush brightened. “No. Not badly. I mean, he was never mean to me, nothing like that.”

“Really? Most kids that age, they can be pretty cruel.”

“Conor never was. He was… he’s a sweet guy. Kind.”

I said, “But…?”

“But…” Fiona rubbed at her cheeks, like she was trying to wipe the flush away. “I mean, I was kind of startled when he even asked me out-I always wondered if maybe he was into Jenny. Nothing he said, just… you know how you get a vibe? And then, once we were going out, he… it felt like… I mean, we had a great time, we had a laugh, but he always wanted to do stuff together with Pat and Jenny. Like go to the cinema with them, or go hang out on the beach with them, or whatever. All his body, all the angles of him always pointed Jenny’s way. And when he looked at her… he lit up. He’d tell some joke, and on the punch line he’d look at her, not at me…”

And there was our motive, the oldest one in the world. In a strange way, it was comforting, knowing that I had been right, way back at the beginning: this hadn’t blown in off the wide sea like some killer gale and crashed into the Spains at random. It had grown out of their own lives.

I could feel Richie practically thrumming, beside me, with how badly he wanted to move. I didn’t look at him. I said, “You thought it was Jenny he wanted. He was going out with you to get closer to her.”

I tried to soften it, but it came out brutal all the same. She flinched. “I guess. Sort of. I think maybe partly that, and partly he was hoping, if we were together, we’d be like them; like Jenny and Pat. They were…”

On the page facing the group shot was a photo of Pat and Jenny-taken the same day, going by the clothes. They were side by side on the wall, leaning into each other, faces turned together, close enough that their noses brushed. Jenny was smiling up at Pat; his face looking down at her was absorbed, intent, happy. The air around them was a hot, sweet summer-white. Far behind their shoulders, a slip of sea was blue as flowers.

Fiona’s hand hovered over the photo, like she wanted to touch but couldn’t do it. She said, “I took that.”

“It’s very good.”

“They were easy to shoot. Most of the time, when you’re taking a shot of two people, you have to be careful with the space in between them, how it breaks up the light. With Pat and Jenny, it was like the light didn’t break, just kept going straight across the gap… They were something special. They both had a load going for them anyway-they were both really popular at school, Pat was great at rugby, Jenny always had a load of guys after her- but together… They were golden. I could’ve watched them all day. You looked at them and you thought, That. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

Her fingertip brushed their clasped hands, skated away. “Conor… his parents were separated, his dad was over in England or somewhere-I’m not positive, Conor never talked about him. Pat and Jenny were the happiest couple he’d ever known. It was like he wanted to be them, and he thought if we went out together, we might… I didn’t put all this stuff into words at the time, or anything, but afterwards, I thought maybe…”

I asked, “Did you talk to him about it?”

“No. I was too embarrassed. I mean, my sister…” Fiona ran her hands through her hair, pulling it forward to hide her cheeks. “I just broke it off. It wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t like I was in love with him. We were just kids.”

But it must have been a big deal, all the same. My sister… Richie shoved back his chair and headed across to switch on the electric kettle again. He said easily, over his shoulder, “I remember you told us Pat got jealous of other guys fancying Jenny, back when you were teenagers. Was that Conor, yeah?”

That brought Fiona’s head up, but he was shaking a coffee sachet and looking at her with simple interest. She said, “He wasn’t jealous like you mean. He just… he’d noticed it, too. So when I broke up with Conor, Pat got me on my own a couple of days later and asked me was that why. I didn’t want to tell him, but Pat… he’s really easy to talk to. I always told him stuff. He was like my big brother. So we ended up talking about it.”

Richie whistled. “When I was a young fella,” he said, “I would’ve been raging if my mate was after my girlfriend. I’m not the violent type, but he’d’ve got a smack in the puss.”

“I think Pat thought about it. I mean”-a sudden flash of alarm-“he wasn’t the violent type either, not ever, but like you said… He was pretty angry. He’d called round to our house to see me-Jenny was out shopping-and when I told him he just walked out. He was white; his face looked like it was made out of something solid. I was actually scared-not that I thought he’d do anything to Conor, I knew he wouldn’t, but I just… I thought what if everyone found out, it’d smash the gang to pieces, everything would be horrible. I wished…” She ducked her head. More quietly, down to her mug: “I wished I’d kept my stupid mouth shut. Or just never gone near Conor to begin with.”

I said, “It was hardly your fault. You couldn’t have known. Or could you?”

Fiona shrugged. “Probably not. I felt like I could’ve, though. Like, why would he be into me when Jenny was around?” Her head was tucked down lower.

There it was again, that glimpse of something deep and tangled, stretched between her and Jenny. I said, “That must have been pretty humiliating.”

“I survived. I mean, I was sixteen; everything was humiliating.”

She was trying to turn it into a joke, but it fell flat. Richie gave her a grin, as he leaned over her shoulder to take her mug, but she passed it to him without catching his eye. I said, “Pat wasn’t the only one who had a right to be pissed off. Weren’t you angry, too? With Jenny, or Conor, or both?”

“I wasn’t that kind of kid. I just felt like it was my own fault. For being such an idiot.”