Chapter Nine #7
“I don’t care either way,” Lena says. “The point is, it was a loada shite. So I’m not going to believe anything else I hear around the place, not without looking into it myself. Mostly I don’t bother my arse, ’cause it’s none of my business, but Rachel made it my business this time.”
“Who knows what’s true and what’s not, at this stage,” Mel says. “If Rachel wanted to talk to you, it coulda been anything.”
“Like what?” Lena says. “You’re in the loop; you tell me. What was worrying her?”
“D’you not think we’ve all been wondering the same fuckin’ thing?” Phil snaps. “I practically sat Louise down and shone a torch in her eyes, asking her had Rachel said anything about anything. I got sweet fuck-all. That’s what everyone’s got, not just you. Sweet fuck-all.”
“For a while there Michelle Healy was going around saying there musta been some TikTok challenge about drinking antifreeze, for fuck’s sake,” Mel says. “That’s how little people have.”
“That’s why everyone reckons ’twas her love life,” Yvonne says. “Not just for the scandal, like. ’Cause there’s nothing else it could be.”
“So everyone jumped straight to her cheating,” Lena says, lifting an eyebrow.
“Even if it was her love life, that could be a million things. Maybe Tommy and Clodagh didn’t approve, or else they were pushing Rachel to do something she didn’t wanta do—go into the family business, let’s say, or who knows what.
But it can’t have been any of that, God no, it hasta have been that Rachel was a slut. ”
“Or Eugene was,” Yvonne points out, with a glance around to make sure no one’s listening.
“There’s plenty of people on that buzz, as well, and that’s a lot more likely if you ask me—no one around here would go sticking it in Eugene Moynihan’s girlfriend, not if he had sense, but Eugene could get up to all sorts in Dublin, and no one’d have a clue.
Look”—she leans closer, across the table—“Tommy and Clodagh wouldn’t be my pick for in-laws, but Rachel was with Eugene years.
She knew what she was getting into, Tommy and Clodagh knew what they were getting—and they were delighted with it, from everything I’ve heard. Why would it all go tits-up overnight?”
She means it. No one has so much as shot each other quick glances, or tightened their lips. There’s no warning here. Nothing is being held unsaid; whatever Eugene and Tommy were at, Rachel kept it to herself. Lena could have stayed home today.
“I suppose,” she says. “Yeah.”
“Either Rachel was doing the dirt on Eugene,” Phil says, “or he was doing something on her. Whichever one it was, the poor girl’s gone; you won’t change that. Pick one and leave it at that.”
Lena looks around the table and understands that, for all of them looking back at her, it’s that clear because it has to be.
The only way their children are safe is if there’s an answer in place, one cleanly confined within the boundaries of Rachel’s life.
Everything beyond that is barred. Whatever happened to Rachel is being crushed out of existence by other people’s needs.
The vodka and Cokes have been wiped away; she’s stone-cold sober. Her mouth has the thick, sour taste of a hangover.
“If you go round asking questions,” Mel says, “all you’ll do is start drama. No one needs that. People are up to ninety already.”
“Drama,” Lena says. “Will I, yeah?”
“We know you wouldn’t mean to,” Julie says quickly. Her face is puckered up with worry. “But we know you, sure. Other people mightn’t get it.”
Lena feels herself staked down by their certainty that, after thirty blank years, they know her. She can’t tell whether it makes her want to laugh or to walk out.
“What Mel’s trying to tell you,” Phil says, “only she’s being tactful, is that people are saying you’re nosing around ’cause you or your detective fella reckon ’twasn’t suicide.
I’m not asking”—she’s holding up a hand, although Lena hasn’t tried to say anything—“I don’t wanta know.
I’m only saying: that’s a fuckin’ gift to anyone that likes stirring up trouble. ”
Here’s the warning at last. It’s one Lena half expected—Cal’s old job has always appealed to Ardnakelty’s imagination—but it’s not the one she was angling for. “Well,” she says. “I’ve never enjoyed starting drama.”
“Good,” Mel says. “Then don’t.”
Phil examines Lena for a moment and gives her a brief nod. “You’re no fool,” she says. “You never were.” She tosses back the rest of her pint, to mark the subject closed.
“Hang on,” Yvonne says, blinking. “If Sean didn’t stop you having mates…” It’s taken her a while to think this out, through the vodka. “If that was a loada aul’ shite. Then how come…?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lena says. She can feel Mrs. Duggan’s gaze scraping at the back of her head again. She doesn’t turn round. “It made some kinda sense at the time.”
“Was that Sonny McHugh I saw you not talking to over there, bucko?” Mart inquires, as Cal settles back onto his stool.
“I said hi,” Cal says. Someone has got in another prepper-sized bunch of pints.
“He just wasn’t talking back. I figure he could have a mood coming on.
” Sonny, the loudest and most jovial of the McHugh brothers, is known to have moods.
Cal gets the sense that elsewhere the moods might be called depression, but anyone using the word to Sonny would get told to fuck off in multiple creative ways.
Francie snorts into his pint. “Don’t be snorting like a fuckin’ bull calf,” Bobby orders him. “There’s no shame in the moods. They could happen to anyone.”
“Doctor fuckin’ Phil, is it? Or Oprah?”
“Sure, you’re nothing but one big mood,” Bobby tells him. “A mood in a shirt that needs ironing.”
“Arrah, fuck off and shift your dolly-bird and don’t be annoying me. You’re pissed.”
Bobby, the resident lightweight, is in fact noticeably drunk. The rest of the guys are a little red around the eyes and a little loose around the neck, nothing that a casual observer would pick up on, but Cal knows the signs.
“Jacks,” Senan says abruptly, standing up and shoving past Bobby.
“See what you done?” Bobby says to Francie. “Now he’s in a mood. We’ll all be—”
“I done fuck-all. That fella lost a child of his own before. D’you want him to be dancing a jig, on the day that’s in it?”
“These last couple of weeks’d give anyone a mood,” Cal says, aiming to restore harmony.
“You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Jean-Claude,” Mart says. “That’s no mood that Sonny’s got on him. Tell me something: you were helping the McHughs trim their hedges not long ago, amn’t I right?”
“Yeah,” Cal says.
“What about this week, and them pulling down that aul’ disgrace of a shed on Con’s land? Did they ask you for a hand?”
“Nope,” Cal says. At the time he figured Sonny must have got his cast off, but the cast is still there.
“Watch this, now,” Mart says. A bunch of the McHugh brothers are clustered around a too-small table, their broad shoulders jostling together like bullocks’.
Mart keeps his gaze on them till Tadhg McHugh glances around and catches his eye.
Mart raises his glass. Tadhg stares for a minute, blank-faced, without nodding or lifting his glass in return. Then he turns away.
“I’ve known that fella since he was in nappies,” Mart says. “I banjaxed my shoulder pulling a ewe of his out of a ditch. He helped carry my mammy’s coffin. And now I could be bleeding to death on his doorstep, and he’d walk over me.”
Cal, looking out at the crowd, sees it shift and click into a pattern that was there all along, right under his nose.
The groupings, and their movement, were never random.
The Moynihans’ table faces the Holohans’, across the room.
Around each one, people have ranged themselves.
They move around, mingling with the people in the middle, buying drinks and asking after ailments and shooting the breeze, and little by little those people have been shifting their stools, one way or the other.
Cal thinks, Shit.
“Father Eamonn wouldn’t be pleased at all, at all,” Mart says. “All that lovely holy advice he worked so hard to give us, and no one heeding a word of it.”
“It’d remind you of a wedding, wouldn’t it?” Bobby says. His face is puckered with worry. “The bride’s side over here, and the groom’s side over there.”
“I was only ever at one wedding that looked like this,” Cal says. “It ended in shooting.”
“This might end in shooting as well,” Francie says, with a sudden sharp note in his voice. He puts down his pint and pushes back his stool. “Look.”
Senan, on his way to the bathroom, has bumped elbows with Long John Sharkey, on his way back from the bar to the Moynihan side of the room.
Long John is staring at the splatter of Guinness on his white shirt, and Senan is staring at Long John.
Both of them have bad looks on their faces.
Their shoulders have rolled into fighting position.
Cal and the others all stand up as Long John says something to Senan, and Senan says something back. Heads have started turning.
“I’ll do it,” Cal says. The noise in the room is falling away. Between heads he gets a glimpse of Fintan Holohan’s face blank with the overload of despair, beyond even being reached by one more damn thing piled onto this day. “Sit down.”
Francie is already moving, but Mart puts out a hand to block him. “Let Jean-Claude sort it,” he says.
Cal moves fast, ignoring the table-corners jabbing him and the handbags snagging his feet. Long John kicks away a stool, making room. Doireann Cunniffe, or someone like her, has started up a high hooting alarm sound. Senan’s fists are rising.
Cal reaches Senan just as Long John goes to shove him in the chest, and just as two of the McHugh brothers grab Long John by the elbows. “Man,” he says, getting an arm around Senan’s shoulders in a grip that’s tighter than it looks. “Not here.”
Senan is red-faced and breathing through his nose like a bull. “I’ll have the fucker,” he says. “Get back.”
He tries to shake off Cal’s arm, but Cal holds on. Long John makes another feint at him, and the McHughs drag him back. Senan laughs and beckons Long John with both hands. Even Doireann Cunniffe has gone silent.
“No,” Cal says, hard and close in Senan’s ear. “The Holohans don’t need that. You want to make their day even worse?”
That reaches Senan. After a moment, his shoulders slowly ease under Cal’s arm.
The McHughs are already turning Long John away, patting and soothing him like they would an angered animal. He lets them herd him, but he glares over his shoulder as he goes. Senan bares his teeth at him.
“Come on,” Cal says. He steers Senan away, towards their table. Slowly the sound starts to return to the room, a tamped-down frenetic buzz. As Cal passes the Moynihans, he sees Tommy looking him right in the eye, with no expression at all.