Ali moved to the mattress on the floor, crawled over it so that she could sit with her back against the wall. She needed to sit very still. Davy was looking at his hands. She remembered him as he was at sixteen, a tall hero. She tried to figure out the likely truth of what he said – was he mistaken, or spinning a tale? She thought of her mother’s story of her grandfather forcing them to kill animals as a mercy.
Minutes passed.
‘When I went back into the kitchen, Una was tending to Joan. She told me to put it away – so I did – I hid it for her. Christmas Day, after the hoo-ha, I saw her coming back down from the pit with the box and she says to me, It’s in a better place, with that pious bloody face on her. My sister. My sister is … remarkable.’
Davy turned to look at Ali, his eyes refocusing.
‘Aaah!’ he cried and lunged in her direction, stretching flat out on the mattress beside her. His hand came from behind a pillow, gripping an almost-full bottle of Paddy by the neck. He rolled away and spun the metal top from it with one rub of his palm. He threw back a slug and held out the bottle to her. ‘You look like you need it.’
‘I don’t like it straight.’
‘Don’t be a fairy.’
She took the bottle and swallowed. It burned inside her mouth and made her lips sting, but as it went down, she felt a warming in her chest, like coming back to life. She took another sip and Davy smiled. She wanted to change the subject.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘aren’t these my mother’s sheets?’
‘Must’ve taken them by mistake.’
‘Mistake?’
‘I don’t know why you’re bothering to go to university; with that nose on you, you should go straight into the cop shop – or the Gestapo – go snooping with the piggy pigs, oink-oink.’ He grabbed the bottle from her, swallowed deep and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Ali tried again to think of something light to talk about, something to make Davy come back to himself. And then she thought of him laughing in the graveyard, the sound of it carrying over Joan’s open grave. And how Peggy had stared at him, her eyes burning; and Sister Bernadette beside her, looking too, angry with Davy for something more than just the laugh.
She stood up, wobbled on the mattress.
‘Where’re you going?’
‘I’m going to get some water – water for the whiskey.’
Ali let the tap run. The night of the marquee dance, she had seen Peggy on the edge of the floor, looking out at the dancers with the most miserable expression. And when Ali had taken her place, Davy was two feet away dancing with Valerie, the woman who had broken it off with him for his wandering eye. What was the connection between Davy and Peggy?
She heard him move about the house, then a loud crack of splintering wood. She didn’t know what he was up to, but stayed at the sink, moving the glass under the water’s flow, filling it and emptying it again and again. What was it that Joan had said to her? You know nothing. Nothing at all.
‘You got a lighter?’ He was in the doorway.
She wiped her hands on her skirt and took her lighter and cigarette box out of her pocket and offered them up.
‘Bring us a glass too – I’m lighting a fire in the front room.’
Ali sat on the sofa, smoking, supping her whiskey and water steadily while Davy assembled a pile of thin wood and newspaper in the rough hole where a fire surround might one day go. He hummed as he touched the flame to the edges of the paper. The wood crisped and spat.
‘That’s cosy now,’ he said, balancing two peat briquettes over the flames. He came to join her on the sofa, filling the tumbler she’d brought for him with whiskey before settling back against the cushions.
‘You’re very quiet, but it’s better you know. Young girls can be very naïve. This is what the world is.’
Her tongue in her mouth was clumsy. ‘Did something happen between you and Peggy?’
‘Aw, Jaysus – that too? Let me make one thing clear: I never fancied her. It was a moment of weakness. You know I’m given to moments of weakness.’
Davy put his hand on Ali’s knee and gave her a rueful smile. She didn’t smile back, but glimpsed a foggy image of Davy’s face very close to hers in the darkness. He sighed and removed his hand, picking up the tale.
‘It was just once or twice. In the back of her daddy’s Jag; what can I say – the surroundings appealed to me. Should have fucked the car instead. She said she was on the pill, said her daddy got her a supply, and I believed her. Next thing she’s up the pole, and telling Valerie about it. And I got no say in any of it. That’s not fair, is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I said she should get rid of it, and do you know what she said to me? She said she would if I’d be her boyfriend. She was trying to hijack my life. My whole life.’
Davy thumped the arm of the sofa so hard the drink in Ali’s glass trembled. She raised it to her lips and tipped all the liquid into her mouth.
‘I convinced her to get it adopted – had a place set up for her in some residential place out in Connemara. Might have led her on a little bit about my feelings to get the job done, okay, but then Antoinette takes Peggy off to Dublin with her, says she doesn’t want her to make any rash decisions …’
Ali thought of
