Trisha broke three eggs into the frying pan. “And was this the boy who used to phone here all the time?”
“Aye. Terry. You met him once. ’Member he came here with his pal’s van to take my old desk out of the garage? Dark hair, a wee bit fat.”
Trisha kept her voice low so the boys wouldn’t hear. “And what was that boy to you?”
“Just a friend.”
“Why did he call all the time?”
“Dunno. Well, he’d been abroad and didn’t really have any pals when he came back. He was lonely, maybe.”
Trisha gave the frying pan an angry little shake.
“Why did they ask you to go and see his body then?”
Paddy shrugged, trying to be casual about it, but one of her shoulders got stuck up around her ears and betrayed her. “I just knew him from way back. We started at the paper at the same time.”
Behind them the boys were squabbling over the free toy from the cereal packet. Without looking, Trisha called over her shoulder, “It’s BC’s shot, son. You got it the last time.”
“But that’s the one I want.” Pete crossed his arms tight and scowled, a tiny despot planning a coup. “I’m the one that likes dinosaurs.”
BC waggled the cheap toy at Pete, taunting him. Paddy and Trisha smiled at the frying pan, keeping their faces from the boys.
“Give it to him,” Caroline ordered her son, always quick to take a side against him.
“Shots each,” said Trisha, “or I’ll keep the toy for myself.”
Using the wooden spatula, Trisha splashed hot fat over the top of the eggs and dropped her voice again. “I mean, the boy surely had some family.”
“Terry had no one,” said Paddy, adding, by way of explanation, “He was a Protestant.”
Trisha smirked: it was an old country joke about non-Catholics, designed to appeal to Trisha’s prejudices, about how Protestants neglected to breed like rats and didn’t all live on top of each other. “You’ve got me down as a right old greenhorn, don’t ye?”
“Ma, I’ve got you down as class on a stick. ’Member the time you dressed the pig up in a tuxedo?”
Trisha smiled into the pan, corrected herself, and gave Paddy a reproachful look. She had taken to widowhood with a wizened vigor and was prone to tutting at anything resembling good fun or high jinks. Without the timidly tempering cynicism of her husband she was more devout now, and since Mary Ann had taken her vows she wouldn’t hear a word against the Church. It left a chasm between them.
The eggs were done, the potato scones and bacon browned, so Paddy picked up the plates and poured the hot water warming them into the sink, dried them with a tea towel, and held them out to her mother.
“Terry put me down on his passport as his next of kin. That’s why they came to me.”
“And the police said the Provos killed him?”
“Yeah. ‘All the hallmarks,’ they said.”
“God help us,” muttered’ Trisha, her voice little more than a breath now, shielding it from the boys. “God help us if that’s true.”
She glanced fearfully at the table and fixed on Pete. “Maybe you should think about giving him his daddy’s name,” she said, still believing that young Catholic men could be arrested for having a name that sounded Irish.
“I don’t think even the Met are rounding up five-year-olds, Ma. Terry was just a friend.”
Trisha didn’t look at her as she dished the breakfast onto the plates and put the pan back on the cooker, clenching her jaw to silence herself.
“Honest.”
They stood, stiff, Trisha looking at the plates in Paddy’s hand and Paddy looking down at her mother. Not long ago Paddy would have been looking her straight in the eye but Trisha was shrinking. Now she could see the top of her head, the gray roots under the gravy brown, loose hairs creeping out from the Elizabeth Taylor set she had done every Monday at Mrs. Tolliver’s house.
Trisha wouldn’t catch her eye because she suspected that Paddy had slept with Terry. Since Pete was born her mother had suspected Paddy of sleeping with every man she mentioned and her disapproval wasn’t just an intergenerational values clash: she believed that Paddy would go to hell for her sins, that the rest of the family would spend eternity in heaven, staring at an empty chair if they didn’t nag and disapprove and vilify her enough.
Compared to her mother Paddy had put it about, but not by much. She’d developed the habit of denying everything.
The boys were fighting again, this time about who was reading the cereal packet.
BC laughed joylessly. “You can’t even read yet.”
“I can so read.”
“Ye can’t read. Read it to me then, go on.”
“I can so read!”
“Go on then, read it out, if ye can read.”
Without looking up, Caroline told BC to shut up.
Trisha tipped her head to the table, telling Paddy to put the plates down, and then followed the turn of her head, swinging towards the table without looking at her. She poured two cups of tea from the steel teapot, setting one in front of Paddy’s place.
The boys had reached an impasse. BC was elaborately reading the back of the cereal packet and rubbing his cheek with the plastic dinosaur, a faded smile on his chubby face-just enough to upset Pete, not enough to get into trouble. He sighed contentedly, as if to say that everything he had ever dreamed of was here: the toy, the reading of the cereal packet, everything. Pete had his arms crossed up near his nose, was about to hide his face in his arms and curl over the table and cry.
“Son.” Paddy touched his arm. “You can choose what we’re doing this morning.”
Too late, she realized what he was bound to say.
Pete looked at her hopefully. “Really? I can choose?”
Anything but not that, she wanted to say, we’re not doing that. But if she forbade him she’d have to explain why, and telling a five-year-old that her friend had been shot in the head was beyond her.
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
To her right Trisha tutted under her breath. She didn’t approve of doing things children liked. She thought it would ruin them.
Pete’s tiny tight fists rose from the nest of his arms. “Lazerdrome!”
“OK, pal.”
Pete threw his head back and silently mouthed a big hurray, observing Trisha’s rule about not shouting in the house.
“Ruined,” muttered Trish through a mouthful of egg and bacon.
III
Throbbing music filled the dark room, disguising the shriek of trainers on the rubber floor and squeals of excitement. Paddy was crouching on one of the wooden walkways, keeping her body behind the partition so that she couldn’t be shot from the ground.
The memory of Terry’s BCG stabbed at her throat. Somehow her relationship with Terry was getting confused with the seagull in Greenock: a big ugly threat that wanted something from her that she didn’t have.
She heard a scream and turned to look down the dark walkway. Through the smog of dried ice she could just make out a strip of tiny colored lights, red through to yellow. There was a child down there and they’d just been shot.
Every person in the room had a pack strapped to their front and back, little light sensors on it to pick up the beam of the bulky laser guns they all carried. Shoot someone and their pack went off for thirty seconds and you got points. Her job here was to lose by a higher margin than Pete and be good about it, to show him it didn’t matter. She had thought it might freak her out after seeing Terry, being here among excited children shooting each other, but it was just an electronic version of tig.
Pete was down there somewhere, on the floor, chasing other kids or hiding, sneaking along a wall, the pack too big for him really, banging off his thighs when he raised his legs to run or climb a ladder.