“That’s a different class of heat, sure,” she says. “From what I’ve heard, the summer in America’d melt your brains. This is just the kinda heat you’d get on holiday in Spain, only for free.”
“Maybe.”
Lena watches his face. “I suppose there’s a few people getting edgy, all right,” she says. “Last week Sheena McHugh threw Joe outa the house, because she said she couldn’t stand the way he chews his food one minute longer. He had to go to his mammy’s.”
“Well, there you go,” Cal says, but his mouth has quirked in a smile. “You’d have to be losing your mind to dump anyone with Miz McHugh. Did Sheena let him back in yet?”
“She did, yeah. He went into town and bought one of them fans, the big tower ones. It’s got an app and all. She’da let in Hannibal Lecter if he was carrying one of those.”
Cal grins. “The heat’ll break,” Lena says. “Then we’ll all be back to giving out about the rain.”
The two rooks are still fighting over Cal’s sandwich crust. A third one sneaks up on them, gets within a couple of feet, and lets loose an explosion of barking. The first two shoot into the air, and the third one grabs the chunk of crust and heads for the hills. Lena and Cal both burst out laughing.
—
Late at night, Trey’s parents are arguing in their room. Trey extracts herself from the sweaty tangle of sheets and Banjo and Alanna, who’s come into her bed again, and goes to the door to listen. Sheila’s voice, low and brief, but sharp; then a load of Johnny, with a note of outrage, controlled but building.
She goes out to the sitting room and turns the telly on, to give herself an excuse for being there, but muted so she can keep an ear out. The room smells of food and stale smoke. The mess has started to silt up again, since she and her dad tidied it the other night—half the carpet is taken up by an arrangement of small staring dolls, and there are a bunch of Nerf bullets and a dirty sock stuffed with sweet wrappers on the sofa. Trey throws them in a corner. On the telly, two pale women in old-fashioned clothes are looking upset about a letter.
Cillian Rushborough came for dinner. “I can’t be cooking for some fancy fella,” Sheila said flatly, when Johnny told her. “Bring him into town.”
“Make Irish stew,” Johnny said, catching her round the waist and planting a kiss on her. He’d been in great form all day, kicking a football around the yard with Liam, and getting Maeve to teach him Irish dancing steps on the kitchen floor. Sheila didn’t kiss him back, or turn away, just kept moving like he wasn’t there. “Heavy on the aul’ spuds. He’ll love it. Sure, your stew’s fit for a billionaire, never mind a millionaire. That’s what we’ll call it from now on, won’t we, lads? Millionaire stew!” Maeve jumped up and down and clapped her hands—ever since their dad got home, she’s been acting like a four-year-old—and Liam started banging his chair legs and chanting something about millionaire stew being made of goo. “Come on, Maeveen,” their dad said, grinning, “get your shoes on, and you and me’ll go down to the shop and get the finest ingredients. Millionaire stew for everyone!”
The little ones had to eat in the sitting room in front of the telly, but Trey and Maeve were let eat in the kitchen with the adults, so Trey got her look at Rushborough. He praised the stew to the skies, went into raptures about his day wandering around the boreens (“Is that how you pronounce it? Honestly, you must correct me, you can’t let me make a fool of myself”), asked Maeve about her favorite music and Trey about carpentry, and told a funny story about getting chased by the Maguires’ goose. Trey has an aversion to charm, which she’s encountered on only a few occasions, mostly in her father. Rushborough is more skilled at it. When he asked her mam about the little watercolor landscape that hangs on the kitchen wall, and got nothing out of her but a few brief words, he backed off instantly and gracefully, and went back to discussing Taylor Swift with Maeve. His deftness makes Trey more wary of him, not less.
She didn’t expect to like Rushborough, and doesn’t consider that to be important. What matters is what she can do about him. She was expecting him to be, not thick, but like Lauren in her class, who believes stupid things because she doesn’t bother to check them enough in her mind. One time Trey’s mate Aidan told Lauren that one of Jedward was his cousin, and she went around telling people that for a whole day, till someone called her a fucking eejit and pointed out that Jedward are twins. But Rushborough checks things. Maeve would say something meant to be funny, and Rushborough would laugh his arse off and then move on; only a minute later Trey would catch his eye resting on Maeve, just for a second, checking what she said against things in his mind.
What Trey reckons is that he wants the gold to be real so badly that he’s decided not to check too hard. If he finds out it’s fake, or at least partly fake, he’ll be raging double, because he’ll be raging at himself as well. But he won’t find out, unless he has no choice. She could tell him straight out what her dad said the other night, and he’d brush her off as a contrary teenager trying to stir shite.
The voices in the bedroom gain in intensity, although not in volume. Trey is weighing up whether she needs to do anything when her parents’ door opens, hard enough to bang off the wall, and Johnny comes down the hall and into the sitting room, buttoning his shirt. Trey knows from the looseness of his movements that he’s about half drunk.
“What are you doing awake?” he demands, when he sees her.
“Watching the telly,” Trey says. She doesn’t think there’s any immediate danger—when her dad hit her before, he mostly went for their mam or Brendan first, and for her only as an afterthought, if he had some left over; and none of the sounds from the bedroom implied that. Her muscles are ready to run if she needs to, all the same. She feels a sudden, savage anger at her body for still having the habit. She had come to believe she was done with this.
Johnny drops into an armchair with a sigh that’s close to a snarl. “Women,” he says, wiping his hands over his face. “Honest to God, they’re the fuckin’ divil.”
He appears to have forgotten that Trey is a girl. People sometimes do. It doesn’t bother her from them, and it neither bothers her nor surprises her from her father. She waits.
“All a man needs from a woman,” Johnny says, “is for her to have a bitta faith in him. That’s what puts the strength into you, when things are tough. A man can do anything in the world, once he knows his woman’s behind him all the way. But her…”
He flicks his head in the direction of the bedroom. “God almighty, the whinging out of her. Oh, she’d a terrible time altogether while I was away, all alone, afraid for her life, ashamed to walk into the shop with the women looking sideways at her, the Guard coming down from town trying to make ye go to school, having to borrow money for the Christmas— Did she do that, even? Or was she just saying it to make me feel guilty?”
“Dunno,” Trey says.
“I said to her, sure what’s there to be afraid of, all the way up here, and what do you care what them bitches say—and if that Guard’s got nothing better to do than give out to kids for mitching, then fuck him anyway. But there’s no talking to a woman that’s looking to make a big fuckin’ deal outa nothing.”
He digs through his pockets for his smokes. “She’s never satisfied, that one. I could bring her the sun, moon, and stars, and she’d find something wrong with them. She wasn’t happy when I was here, and she wasn’t happy when I was gone. And sure”—Johnny’s hands fly up in outrage—“sure, I’m back now. Here I am. Sitting here. I’ve a plan to put the lot of us on the pig’s back. And she’s still not fuckin’ happy. What the fuck does she want from me?”