Chapter Twenty-One #3
“She was working herself up worse and worse,” Eugene says.
“I never expected her to be so…Like, ‘Do I need to leave you, is that what I need to do, if I say it’s this or me, then will you—’ I didn’t know what to do with that.
I mean, I knew she wasn’t going to actually break up with me, but just hearing her say it, she’d never talked like that before… ”
The brittle professional veneer has cracked away; he sounds ragged and helpless, like he’s begging Cal or Tommy or someone to tell him how to fix this.
“In the end she went, ‘I need to go home, I just need to be on my own and have a think.’ So I said yeah, OK, let’s take a few hours, but I didn’t want to leave it too long.
Not with her that upset. And Rachel—I mean, I’d told her not to say anything to anyone, but she hated keeping secrets—”
“In fairness,” Tommy points out reasonably, “you weren’t after doing a great job of the aul’ confidentiality yourself.
You couldn’t expect her to do better.” None of this is a surprise to Tommy.
He’s meditatively turning the gold signet ring on his little finger, watching them all under his eyebrows, waiting.
“I just wanted it sorted out,” Eugene said. “I knew it would be, in the end, I just…I didn’t like leaving it. So I told her to meet me at the bridge that evening.”
“In that weather?” Senan says. “Fuck me. I thought this fella said you treated her like a princess.”
“It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t raining. Where were we supposed to go?
The pub? Here?” Eugene jerks his head at the house like it’s a shithole.
“We needed privacy. And the bridge is where we go on, like, special occasions. It’s her favorite place.
I’d been planning to propose there. I thought maybe, maybe I could—” His face flinches away.
“You thought maybe a big diamond’d sweeten her,” Francie says. “That’s what you thought.”
That snaps Eugene back to them. “Um, no? Rachel wasn’t like that, and I’m not stupid. But yeah, actually, I thought if we got engaged and everything was great and she had that to focus on, it would give her some perspective, so she wouldn’t be stressing out over the other thing.”
“Makes sense,” Cal says. “So what happened?”
“He did. He’d run into me and Rachel, he knew something was up—like I said, she was never any good at hiding things. I told him everything was fine, I had the situation under control, but no, apparently that wasn’t good enough. He spent the whole evening going at me, till he got it out of me.”
“Ya fuckin’ dope,” Senan says. “And here’s you saying Rachel couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”
“Bet your daddy wasn’t a happy camper,” Cal says.
The memory makes Eugene blink. “He went ballistic. Losing his fucking mind, kicking furniture, I thought he was going to, I don’t know— ‘What the fuck were you thinking, are you fucking stupid, are you trying to wreck everything I’ve worked for—’ ”
Tommy is watching him in disbelief, eyebrows high, glancing around to invite the other guys to share the absurdity of this. Francie gives him a blank stare back.
“I told him Rachel just needed time to come round,” Eugene says. “I told him. If he had listened to me, for once in his—”
“Ah, now,” Tommy says, “I always listen to you. That doesn’t mean I’ll always agree with you.” The smoothness says these are words he’s used plenty of times. He’s trying to catch Eugene by the reflexes and bring him back into line, but Tommy’s read it wrong again. Eugene is way past that.
“Then he asked me,” Eugene says, “ ‘And what’ll you do if she doesn’t come round?
Has she cut off your balls for you, boy, are you her bitch now, are you going to bend over and do whatever she wants?
’ ” He’s doing his dad’s accent, with furious perfection.
“And I told him yes. I said yeah, actually, if Rachel didn’t come round, then fuck the county council, fuck his whole bullshit plan, he could stick them up his hole, because I was out.
And I said I was heading out to meet Rachel and tell her the same thing. ”
Tommy is watching Eugene with the profound disappointment of a man whose wayward teenager, after all that good raising, just got caught shoplifting vapes.
Cal says, “Only you didn’t.”
“No,” Eugene says. “I didn’t.” Just for a second, his eyes close against the blinding flash of the ways things could have been different.
“Why not?” Cal asks.
“Why the fuck do you think? He told me to stay here, and he’d go talk to Rachel. He said…” Eugene’s mouth twists. “He said I’d made enough of a hames of this already, now I needed to get out of the way and let a grown man sort it.”
Bobby says, disgusted, “And you done it?”
“Yes,” Eugene says, tight-jawed, “I did. Exactly like you would have. Up until all this hit the fan, when was the last time any of you said no to him? Come on, go for it, I’d love to know. When?”
No one answers.
Cal says, “How come you didn’t text Rachel, let her know what was going on?”
Eugene’s face goes fiery with shame. After a second he says, without looking at any of them, “He took my phone.”
“I did,” Tommy agrees. “For his own good. The lad was hysterical with worry over the mess he was after making. He was in no state to be talking to that poor girl; he’d only have put the both of them in a worse tizzy.”
“What time did he leave here?” Cal asks Eugene.
“Is this an interrogation?” Tommy inquires. His voice is leisurely and half-amused; he’s humoring them, showing he’s got nothing to worry about, letting this play out till he decides to stop it. “Shouldn’t you be reading us the aul’ Miranda rights?”
Eugene doesn’t look at him. “Around nine,” he says. “Rachel and I were going to meet at half-nine, and it’s about twenty minutes from here to the bridge, on foot—he didn’t take the car.”
“Well, that fits with what my witnesses saw,” Cal says, and hears Tommy’s tolerant little snort at the word. “When did he get back?”
“Like eleven.”
That leaves more than an hour unaccounted for.
Cal wonders what Rachel thought, when she turned on the bridge to see Tommy coming out of the trees instead of Eugene; whether she was frightened.
Tommy would have done a wonderful job of reassuring her.
Eugene said you were worrying your head, God almighty you have the poor fella in an awful state, he asked me to set your mind at rest. Sit down here and we’ll have a chat, you must be frozen, I’ve brought a flask of lovely sweet tea to warm you up.
Now, have a sup of that, and talk to me…
Probably he listened to all her arguments; maybe he let her talk him around, inch by inch, giving the antifreeze time to work.
Once she had slipped too far to fight off either him or the river, he agreed with everything she’d said, helped her to her feet, and pushed.
Cal thinks of the white moon blurred by cloud, and the white of Tommy’s hair as he stood on the bridge watching the white of Rachel’s jacket spin downstream, and all the miles of dark around them.
He says, “And what’d he tell you, when he came in?”
“He said,” Eugene says, very clearly and with great anger, “he said he’d changed his mind about talking to Rachel.
He wasn’t in the right frame of mind to do that, he said, after dealing with me throwing a tantrum like a child; he’d have to do it the next day.
He said he’d just gone for a walk instead, to cool off.
Up towards Kilhone. In the opposite direction from the river. ”
“How’d he seem?” Cal asks. “Still annoyed, calmed down, what?”
Eugene looks at Tommy. Tommy is leaning back in his chair, watching the scene with a weary disappointment in all of them.
Behind him, the sun is sinking fast; the radiance has drained from the fields, and taken their solidity with it.
They’re made of mist, like you could walk into them and disappear.
“He hadn’t cooled off,” Eugene says. “He was in worse shape than when he left. Jumpy as fuck, obviously upset about something. At first I assumed things had gone wrong with Rachel, I was like, Shit, what did he say to her, did he just make everything way worse? But when I asked him, he roared at me not to be a fucking fool. Then he gave me that story about going for a walk.”
“Ah, now, Eugene,” Tommy says, waving an admonishing finger.
“If you really feel a need to go into all this, I won’t stop you, but let’s stick to the facts.
I was in grand form. A wee bit ashamed of myself, is all, for trying to take matters outa Eugene’s hands—sure, he’s a grown man now, I shouldn’t be poking my nose into his dealings with his lady friend, but isn’t it awful hard sometimes to remember that the little ones are after getting big?
” He throws a bittersweet smile to Senan, since Senan has kids. Senan stares back.
Eugene says, “He was climbing the fucking walls.”
“Language,” Tommy reminds him.
“I didn’t really clock it at the time,” Eugene says.
“I was focused on Rachel—like, what the fuck, he left her just waiting there, in the cold, thinking I’d ghosted her?
Only when he gave me my phone back, she hadn’t rung to ask where I was, so I thought maybe she was so upset that she hadn’t even come out.
So I phoned her, but she wasn’t answering.
I texted her and she didn’t read it. In the end I rang her house—not that I was about to get into the whole thing with her parents, I just said I wanted to say good night. And they thought she was with me.”
He’s talking faster, like if he can just speed hard enough, he’ll reach her in time.