style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Beer money!’
Cathal and Ginger followed Kathleen into her house and surveyed the furniture. ‘What do you want us to do?’
‘Move it to a dump somewhere. Keep it if you want it.’
The boys shrugged and started heaving the furniture out into the street. They set down a three-piece suite on the footpath and sat on it, enjoying the incongruity of living-room comfort in the open air.
The girl said, ‘This stuff’s better than our own. Take our own stuff out and let’s put this in. What’re the mattresses like?’
‘One smells like somebody died in it,’ said Cathal.
In an hour, half the furniture from Kathleen’s house was in the street along with half the furniture from the house next door. Other students, thinking this signalled a party, joined in. Some came rolling armchairs on frail castors over mottled tarmac. Kathleen’s first impulse was to feel responsible and plead with them to behave, but then she decided that she had more important things to think about. And there was a furniture van coming up the street, the delivery from her brother.
‘Delivery for Brankin,’ said the driver. Kathleen wished she had cleaned the place better first. Shifting the other furniture had unsettled dust and scraps everywhere. She needed time to get the carpets up too, but if she let the driver put this new furniture down on the street, it would be absorbed by these crazy students into their spontaneous party.
Two men brought in the furniture and set it down roughly where she wanted it.
‘There’s a couple of rugs as well, madam,’ said the driver.
Bill had picked them out for her. Well, she thought, they would cover the shitty carpet for now. The men spread one of them out on the living-room floor, half of it flopping against the new sofa. It was yellow and red in a mix of squares and triangles and had very deep pile. ‘Perfect.’
‘Anything else, madam?’
Kathleen tipped the men a tenner and they left.
The kids outside now had a music system on the street and were playing rebel songs. One of them was dancing with the tricolour she had wiped the bathroom floor with. Were they waving it in her face? They were waving it in somebody’s face.
In an hour this shambles would be a home. Well, she had made temporary homes before out of dingy flats and rooms in shared houses. Terry had done it too.
He rang that evening.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m moving into Damascus Street.’
‘Fuck’s sake, Kathleen.’
‘Let me do this, Terry. I need space right now. I’ll see you tomorrow. Did you get something to eat?’
‘I’m fine.’
***
At first, dreamily, Kathleen persuaded herself that the alarming sound of breaking glass had come from the party below her window and that she could go back to sleep, but then she registered that there was now only silence outside and that the damage was closer, in fact, inside the room. Clawing her way back from preoccupations that she couldn’t recall, she resented the feeling that she was missing something. But the smell of petrol was not from some revved-up car. It was a vapour close enough to be irksome, like filth in her nose and gullet. She knew by the feel of heat on her face that she was in trouble even before she saw flames crackling through the curtains. She had to wake herself up and get out of there. And she was naked. She whipped the duvet from the bed and tried to fold herself into it, but tripped over. She scolded herself, bundled up the duvet and ran out of the room, hoping, as she scuttled down the stairs, she’d be able to cover herself before she reached the street.
She stopped at her front door. Downstairs still looked normal. She took seconds to wrap the duvet round herself, and then the door came crashing through and a man tumbled over her. His skin was on her skin. His hand pressed into her in the dark as he lifted himself up. He was wearing boxer shorts and trainers, and stepped on her while getting off her.
He’d rallied himself. ‘Get out, Missus. Get out!’
It was Ginger, one of the boys from next door. He fumbled the duvet over her as she tried to stand but she snatched it from him and ran into the street.
‘She’s alright,’ Ginger was shouting. ‘I got her out.’
Kathleen tried to calm herself and see what was happening. She was barefoot on tarmac. The red paint on her toenails looked absurd now. Cathal and the girl approached her timidly, staring at this wild frantic woman and then at the flames at her window.
‘Did one of you bastards do this?’ she yelled at them.
The girl called the emergency services on her mobile, and Cathal and Ginger ran into the house to beat out the flames, so the fire was dead before the first tender arrived.
‘You’ll want a pair of clean knickers, won’t you, Missus?’ said the girl, caustically.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kathleen, still unable to rally any gratitude.
The girl brought her into their house. It was such a mess she wondered if there had been a calamity here too, but the students didn’t seem to notice that stacks of books on the stairs had tumbled over into heaps and that the carpet was actually sticky under foot.
The girl gave Kathleen a shirt, a jumper and a pair of jeans. She closed the living room door to keep out the boys while she put them on. The jeans were too tight to fasten at the waist. The girl said her name was Aoife. She was from Strabane.
She said, ‘What would you want to come and stay in a place like this for?’
Kathleen laughed.
‘Not that this sort of thing happens every night.’
‘I should hope not,’ said Kathleen.
There was now a fire tender in the street and firemen standing around discussing whether to hose the house. A policewoman came into the kitchen. She was hardly much older than the students and Kathleen wondered who’d thought of giving her a pistol and sending her into company like this, where she could be jostled and have it taken from her, but the students were wary and deferred to her.
Kathleen had to settle her thoughts and focus. Aoife was giving her a cup of tea. There wasn’t much to tell. She had been asleep and was awakened by breaking glass. She couldn’t remember whether she had heard the glass first or smelt the petrol first. Someone had firebombed her house. She was only just beginning to realise that. Kathleen sat quietly for a full minute, just rubbing her brow and wondering how to cope.
Cathal came in. ‘Everything up there stinks, but here’s your phone.’
There was a new text message. It was from Terry. It read, ‘I love you.’
‘Have you any thoughts on who might have done this?’ the policewoman asked.
Kathleen tried to pay a little more attention to her now that her concentration was returning. ‘No. Have you?’
