—She kissed me.
—Where was Trish, exactly?
—Exactly, Davy? Exactly? Is this a murder investigation?
—Okay.
—For fuck sake, Davy.
—Okay – sorry. Go on.
—The home economics room, he said. —Or woodwork. Somewhere else. We took four teachers each, to get it over with as quickly as possible. Even at that, it took all afternoon. It’s the only chance the teachers get to talk to adults. So, they fuckin’ grab it. I was lucky.
—How come?
—I got to meet the maths teacher, he said. —A gobshite, by the way. But I was outside his door. I just happened to be there.
—And she walked in while you were waiting.
—Right place, right time. Yeah. Like I said – I was lucky.
—One of your kids does home economics and woodwork?
—What?
—You said home economics or woodwork. Trish was in one of those rooms.
—You’re being Columbo again, Davy.
—Lay off.
—I just meant – like, for example. The rooms. Trish was somewhere else, in one of the other rooms, you know. Way off somewhere in the building.
—Which kid was it?
I’d never met his children and I didn’t know their names. We told each other about the kids, brought each other up to date whenever we met, and then forgot about them. I hadn’t seen Trish in twenty years.
—Holly, he said.
—You sure?
—Yeah, he said. —Of course, I am. Fuck off.
—Okay.
—You’re being a bit of a prick, Davy.
—I’m not.
—You are.
—It’s a bit of a shock.
—Why does it even matter?
—Okay.
—To you.
—I know.
I’d never seen him with his children but I knew he was a good father. And I knew what that meant. He was reliable. He’d given them their routines. He’d come home at much the same time every evening. He’d picked them up from football or gymnastics and he’d always been there on time. They’d seen him filling the dishwasher and the washing machine. They’d seen him cooking at the weekends; they’d probably preferred his cooking to Trish’s. He’d served them Fanta in wine glasses on Saturday nights. He’d told them he loved them, twice a day, start and end. He’d read to them – the same book, again and again – gone swimming with them, slept on a chair beside them when they’d been kept overnight in Temple Street Children’s Hospital. He’d read about asthma, eczema, OCD, intersexuality. He wasn’t a man who didn’t know what subjects his kids had done in school. He would never have pretended that he was that man.
He was right. It shouldn’t have mattered. I shouldn’t have cared. But it did. And I did.
* * *
—
We saw her there the first day, at a table under one of the windows.
We’d found a pub that liked us. We’d wandered the city centre for months, every weekend, starting after work on Friday and ending ten minutes before the last bus home on Sunday night. This was after I graduated and had new money in my pocket. We’d escaped from my front room and the record player. I could buy my round. We were peers now and we could become the lifelong friends we hadn’t really been before. Getting drunk together, sneering at the world together, aching for the same women, denying it. We became the same man for a couple of important years. Before I left. Before he met Trish. Before I met Faye.
That day, the day we saw the girl who became the woman he saw years later, we got lost in the basement of Mercer’s Hospital. We’d left Sheehan’s on Chatham Street at the start of the holy hour – the pubs used to shut for an hour in the afternoon – and we’d wandered up to the Dandelion Market. But we were already too drunk – not drunk, exactly; more oiled – to flick through second-hand books and records. So we left, went back out on to South King Street. We got a bowl of chilli in a tiny place long gone and without a name; I’ll never remember what it was called. It was so small, it didn’t have a toilet. That was fine back then, normal, a restaurant or café without a loo. We were on South King Street again. We were the same man and we admitted we were bursting for a piss, really bursting, half an hour before the pub doors would open. Mercer’s Hospital rose before us and we went in, trying to look like young men visiting a sick relative, and – I don’t know why; I don’t think I ever knew – we went down the stairs to the basement, instead of up to the wards. I remember the ceiling being low, just above our heads. There was no one else down there, no charging men or women in scrubs. There were no stretchers or abandoned wheelchairs – I can’t remember any. One corridor became two corridors, and another two – and no toilet. We ended up pissing into an enamel bucket in a broom cupboard, first him, then me; there was only room for one of us at a time.
We passed a toilet on our way back out. We didn’t laugh. We were quickly ashamed – I was. The pubs were open when we got out into daylight, through a different door.
It was right in front of us. We’d never noticed it before. It had its own corner. We must have walked past it once or twice but we hadn’t seen it.
—Looks okay, said Joe.
And it did.
We were sober again. It was early winter, afternoon. The sky was clear and the sun was making blocks of yellow and grey – the last few hours before night, the perfect time for drinking. Mercer’s Hospital was behind us. Literally behind us. A pint would cure us, drown the shame. We’d start laughing again after the second.
We were twenty-one.
We looked in the window. It was plain inside, but a bit more than the standard Dublin pub. There was less wood, more light. There was one man sitting at the bar, his back to us. He was wearing a suit and there was a grey ponytail resting on the back of the jacket. It was the first time I’d seen a ponytail on a man who wasn’t on The Old Grey Whistle Test. There were tables along the other wall, under a line of windows. Only one of them was occupied, by four people – a man and three women. There was a cello leaning against the wall between two windows, and three violin cases sat on the table beside them. The women were drinking pints.
She was one of those women.
—Do we go in?
—Definitely, said Joe.
The double door was on the corner, under a porch. He went for the right side, I took the left. Both doors opened when we pushed, then walked in side by side – and sideways. The doors swung back into place behind us. We heard them creak, and rest.