I listen to the Asian family being bed-and-breakfasted by the Council in the next room and think of how the envious bitch of a receptionist gawks at us each Sunday. I arrived early last week. ‘Your friend isn’t here yet,’ she said. ‘He’s not my friend.’ I eyed her coldly, raising my voice. ‘He’s my lover!’
Luke turns towards me, half asleep as always after he comes. Sometimes I claim that he calls me by his wife’s name when he wakes. It frightens him in case he’s doing the same with her. I like it when I can frighten Luke, especially as he scares me so easily. Maybe this edge of fear has held us together for all these weeks, because I know our affair cannot last.
I touch the scar below his left nipple. After all those early fights, this is the only mark on his body. The Canal Wars, he called them. I looked it up once in a book on Irish history. He laughed when I said I couldn’t find it, and spoke of rival gangs of Dublin youths fighting for possession of a canal lock where they could swim among the reeds and rusted prams in their underpants. Luke had been ten, sent out by his big brother Christy to spy on the enemy. A rival gang caught him in a laneway and stripped off his shirt before a ginger haired boy with a deformed hand slashed at Luke’s flesh with a bicycle chain. He came home with blood on his clothes. His mother sat with him in the hospital while the stitches were done. Weeks later an uncle struck him across the face in the street for allowing himself to be caught by anyone.
‘I was never caught again,’ Luke told me once. ‘The best lesson I ever learnt. Fifteen years later I glanced up in the jakes of a pub in Birmingham and recognised that deformed hand. The man grinned sheepishly. “Jaysus, they were great oul days all the same, Mr Duggan.” You couldn’t hate a man who grinned like that. I pulled his jacket over his face so as not to leave scars when I kicked his head in.’
I had liked the way Luke said that, the consideration in his voice. Why bother all those years later, I asked. What could it prove? Luke had shrugged and claimed he’d no choice. It was the least that was expected of him back then. For years Ginger’s fate had hung over him because he always knew he would meet one of the Duggans again. The man would have felt slighted if Luke hadn’t bothered beating him up.
If they met now, Luke claims he wouldn’t touch the man, having escaped from the lure of that family name, but I don’t know if I want to believe him or not. I trace my finger across Luke’s scar. He has had it so long that the stitch marks have faded into his skin. There’s something vaguely delicate about it. His eyes watch me.
‘Why are you always fidgeting with that?’
I close my eyes and see Luke diving from the rotting beams of a Dublin canal lock, his thin, eleven year old body splitting the green water apart. He sinks down, eyes opening in the fading green light. Bottles, reeds and a rusted milk churn. Something catches his ankle and he panics from memory, floundering his way to the surface to spit the oily water out. No boys are left to wage war since the accident. His cheap vest flaps alone under a stone like a flag of surrender.
‘Tell me about the canal again.’
‘No.’
‘Go on, Luke.’
He rises on one elbow. Is he angry or scared?
‘You’re one mad bitch at times,’ he says.
‘Only at times? Go on, tell me about James Kennedy.’
I know he will tell me and he knows that I know. But not for a while yet. The story must be drawn from him. Thirty years later the memory is still raw. Sixteen months ago I watched my mother die in Harrow, but I had been prepared for it, with nurses discreetly waiting in the background and the cleansing scent of disinfectant. Her death had been so prolonged I had grown almost resentful of her. But what must it have been like at eleven to see your best friend drown?
Before then Luke’s brother, Christy, was the gang’s natural leader. But, at twelve, Christy was initiating himself into the stronger currencies of adolescence; the webs of factory skylights, the nods of silent fences, the expanding limits of pubescent girls allowing themselves to be manoeuvred into alleyways. In that vacuum James Kennedy had become the Canal King, the reigning monarch of their childhood who plotted wars and conquests, with Luke happy as his lieutenant.
Somewhere in Luke’s memory it must still be that parched July day, when thirty rival youths were beaten back from the canal lock and James Kennedy’s gang danced on the rotten planks in Y-fronted celebration. They dived repeatedly from the wooden gates, raising a constant spray of foam as dogs shook themselves dry on the tow-path and an old tramp hunched down to watch, sucking on a discarded butt. What madness made Luke dive from so high up on the lock, and what choice had James but to climb even higher? The hush began before James’ body even broken the water, as each boy counted the seconds, waiting for James’ head to re-emerge. Thirteen seconds, fourteen, fifteen. Nobody wanted to admit that something was wrong. Nineteen, twenty, the sudden rush of bodies instinctively diving in.
James was still alive when they gathered around him, his foot caught in the spokes of an old wheel. Lush reeds were twisted round his ankle. Some boys claimed that the reeds were alive, wrapping themselves tightly round James’ shin no matter how often they tried to prise them away. The others were forced to surface for air, while James’ kid brother, Joe, screamed and wet his trousers on the bank. There was only James and Luke left down there, with James’ face turning blue and his eyes curiously calm as if saying; ‘you’re the new king, kiddo, it’s all on your shoulders now’. When the others dived again it was to pull their hands apart and bear Luke up into his new kingdom of barking dogs and sirens under the scorching sun.
Soon Luke will tell me this story again beneath the blankets, his voice cold and emotionless. I’ll feel his penis stiffen and know that afterwards he will turn me on my stomach, his hands merciless as he grasps my hips to drag me back and forth. I will raise my hands to pull the blankets tight, drowning under the blackness we are submerged beneath, as I listen to his hard excited breath and think of how his heart will beat, loud and fast as if scared, in the silence after we have spent.
I open my eyes, surprised that I have slept. I can hear the Asians watching a Star Trek movie. The carpet is threadbare and cold against my feet. I find my tights in the street light coming through the gaps in the blinds, hesitate and then pocket his walkman with the tape. Sean Maguire is the fiddler, he says. I think of Luke in jail that one time in Dublin, slopping out and being ridiculed for listening to bog music like that, with his family name alone protecting him. Luke claims that he has been a legitimate businessman for years now, but he never tells me why he served time and there are things that even I know not to ask.
The hotel room is freezing. I find my skirt and shoes. Luke hates me leaving without waking him. That’s why he has hidden my knickers. He will reach for them beneath the mattress in half an hour’s time, fingering them like some obscure consolation as he imagines me sitting on the swaying tube to Angel, being eyed by black youths in baseball hats. My legs will be crossed as I read the ads for fountain pens and office temps, while in my ears his tape will play like a phantom pain, bringing back all the memories I have never told him about.
The child whom I was once in my grandparents’ house in Harrow seems like a stranger now. By day she would obey her Gran’s clock-work ordinance, but alone at night she would close her eyes to imagine rooftops huddled against a Donegal hillside and neighbours gathering to hear her father play in hamlets and remote glens. I can see her still dancing barefoot, while my mother and Gran argued about her future downstairs. Swaying to tunes she could only imagine and spinning ever faster until, finally, falling on to the bed and gripping the blankets dizzily over her