“Will he give you one?”
“Yes.”
She used to watch him for Sheila sometimes, when he was little. I have a vague memory of him as a shy, skinny boy, playing with us in a paddling pool.
“Why would he want to help?”
“He’s changed. He’s become religious in prison.”
I laugh. “Wasn’t that always the problem?”
She levels her gaze at me, and I feel myself tense for the usual fight with something like pleasure. It’d be a relief, under these circumstances, to have our normal argument.
She says, “I’m not getting into this with you again.”
“Don’t say it like that, like it’s something I keep bringing up.”
“You did bring it up,” she says.
“No, you said Eoin Royce had found religion like it was a good thing.”
“It is a good thing.”
“How can you have lived here for fifty-eight years and still believe that?”
“Religion doesn’t make people violent, Tessa.”
“Yes, it does. It encourages them.”
Both of Eoin’s rifles were loaded, and the holiday market was crowded with people. He was stopped outside the north gate, near the carousel, where a dozen children were riding on the painted horses.
“Do you not mind that we have segregated schools?” I ask. Not only schools. Graveyards, bus stops, barber shops.
My mother turns from me to open the fridge, her shoulders hunched. Watching her, I feel myself come loose. She’s too distracted to fight with me. She starts to move things around on a shelf, searching for cream.
“There’s only semi-skimmed,” I say.
She nods, and tips the milk into her coffee. Normally she’d complain. I can hear Marian imitating her: Girls, you know I can’t be doing with semi-skimmed.
If Eoin does agree to help, he should be able to find information about Marian. He’s with other IRA prisoners, with dozens of visitors coming and going, bringing in news.
“Do you think it’s an act?” I ask.
“What?”
“His change of heart. Is Eoin actually sorry?”
“I think so,” she says.
The detectives restrained Eoin quietly, without drawing attention. The market remained intact. People walked under the fairy lights along the rows of red-and-white painted stalls, drank mulled wine, bought presents for their families. A few feet away from him, children carried on riding the carousel.
* * *
—
After clearing away our dishes, I carry Finn outside. He rocks forward, testing his weight on his hands, trying to work out how to crawl. Past the garden wall, the sheep field dips and then rises over a hill. Through the sliding door, I can see my mam on the phone with her brother at the kitchen table.
A picture of Marian is taped to the fridge, from her birthday dinner at Molly’s Yard, and I look at her bright eyes, her red lipstick. Marian’s not vain, but she does have elaborate regimens. Recently, on seeing all the expensive cosmetics and pots of lotion in her bathroom, I said, “How can you afford this?”
She shrugged. “No overhead.”
Paramedics here don’t make much money, which is odd, considering the utility of their job compared to, say, mine. But she lives in a postage-stamp-size flat. Her budget doesn’t have to cover a mortgage, childcare, or student loans, like mine.
“You should save,” I said.
“What’s the point? I’ll never be able to afford a house anyway.”
We’re only two years apart, but lately it has felt like more.
A few weeks after he was born, I brought Finn over to her flat. We’d been up for hours, but Marian had just woken. At the door, she rubbed her eyes, smearing last night’s mascara, and I had the completely foreign sense that she might not want to see me, that we were intruding.
She’d had friends over the night before, and the flat was littered with empty bottles of red wine, a wooden salad bowl plastered with wilted leaves, a scraped pan of lasagna. Her friends had stayed late talking and listening to music. Some of them had gone on to Lavery’s.
My weekend wasn’t worse, but it was incomparably different from hers. It had involved a fair amount of toil—cleaning, laundry, washing—and very little sleep, but then here was Finn, curled against me, gripping my shirt in his small hands, blinking around the room.
“I think he’s hungry. Sorry, do you mind—？” I asked, suddenly shy about nursing him in front of her. Marian cleared a tangle of clothes from her velvet armchair. While I fed him, she began to clean up from the party. I hated feeling different from Marian, like one of us must have betrayed the other for our circumstances to have diverged so much.