looking at the living room’s drawn curtains. Fourteen years old and with a dagger through his heart, he can’t see what’s going on, but his imagination was well nurtured by his mother’s daytime weeping, and he can guess.
And so he raises his arms above his head, pulls back, and with all his strength pushes forward and releases the object in his hands. He stands back to watch, with bitter joy, as a fifteen-pound frozen turkey smashes through the window of the living room of number twenty-four. The drawn curtains act once again as a barrier between him and them, slowing the bird’s flight through the air. With no life left to stop itself now, it – and its giblets – descend rapidly to the wooden floor, where it’s sent, spinning and skidding, along to its final resting place beneath the Christmas tree. His gift to them.
People, like houses, hold their secrets. Sometimes the secrets inhabit them, sometimes they inhabit their secrets. They wrap their arms tight to hug them close, twist their tongues around the truth. But after time truth prevails, rises above all else. It squirms and wriggles inside, grows until the swollen tongue can’t wrap itself around the lie any longer, until the time comes when it needs to spit the words out and send truth flying through the air and crashing into the world. Truth and time always work alongside one another.
This story is about people, secrets and time. About people who, not unlike parcels, hide secrets, who cover themselves with layers until they present themselves to the right ones who can unwrap them and see inside. Sometimes you have to give yourself to somebody in order to see who you are. Sometimes you have to unravel things to get to the core.
This is a story about a person who finds out who they are. About a person who is unravelled and whose core is revealed to all that count. And all that count are revealed to them. Just in time.
Sergeant Raphael O’Reilly moved slowly and methodically about the cramped staff kitchen of Howth Garda Station, his mind going over and over the revelations of the morning. Known to others as Raphie, pronounced Ray-fee, at fifty-nine years old he had one more year to go until his retirement. He’d never thought he’d be looking forward to that day until the events of this morning had grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him upside down like a snow-shaker, and he’d been forced to watch all his preconceptions sprinkle to the ground. With every step he took he heard the crackle of his once-solid tight beliefs under his boots. Of all the mornings and moments he had experienced in his forty-year career, what a morning this one had been.
He spooned two heaps of instant coffee into his mug. The mug, shaped like an NYPD squad car, had been brought back from New York by one of the boys at the station, as his Christmas gift. He pretended the sight of it offended him, but secretly he found it comforting. Gripping it in his hands during that morning’s Kris Kringle reveal, he’d time-travelled back over fifty years to when he’d received a toy police car one Christmas from his parents. It was a gift he’d cherished until he’d abandoned it outside overnight and the rain had done enough rust damage to force his men into early retirement. He held the mug in his hands now, feeling that he should run it along the countertop making siren noises with his mouth before crashing it into the bag of sugar, which – if nobody was around to see – would consequently tip over and spill onto the car.
Instead of doing that, he checked around the kitchen to ensure he was alone, then added half a teaspoon of sugar to his mug. A little more confident, he coughed to disguise the crinkling sound of the sugar bag as the spoon once again pushed down and then quickly fired a heaped teaspoon into the mug. Having gotten away with two spoons, he became cocky and reached into the bag one more time.
‘Drop your weapon, sir,’ a female voice from the doorway called with authority.
Startled by the sudden presence, Raphie jumped, the sugar from his spoon spilling over the counter. It was a mug-on-sugar-bag pile-up. Time to call for back-up.
‘Caught in the act, Raphie.’ His colleague Jessica joined him at the counter and whipped the spoon from his hand.
She took a mug from the cupboard – a Jessica Rabbit novelty mug, compliments of Kris Kringle – and slid it across the counter to him. Porcelain Jessica’s voluptuous breasts brushed against his car, and the boy in Raphie thought about how happy his men inside would be.
‘I’ll have one too.’ She broke into his thoughts of his men playing pat-a-cake with Jessica Rabbit.
‘Please,’ Raphie corrected her.
‘Please,’ she imitated him, rolling her eyes.
Jessica was a new recruit. She’d just joined the station six months ago, and already Raphie had grown more than fond of her. He had a soft spot for the twenty-six-year-old, five-foot-four athletic blonde who always seemed willing and able, no matter what her task was. He also felt she brought a much-needed feminine energy to the all-male team at the station. Many of the other men agreed, but not quite for the same reasons as Raphie. He saw her as the daughter that he’d never had. Or that he’d had, but lost. He shook that thought out of his head and watched Jessica cleaning the spilled sugar from the counter.
Despite her energy, her eyes – almond-shaped and such a dark brown they were almost black – buried something beneath. As though a top-layer of soil had been freshly added, and pretty soon the weeds or whatever was decaying beneath would begin to show. Her eyes held a mystery that he didn’t much want to explore, but he knew that whatever it was, it drove her forward during those stand-out times when most sensible people would go the opposite way.
‘Half a spoon is hardly going to kill me,’ he added grumpily after tasting his coffee, knowing that just one more spoon would have made it perfect.
‘If pulling that Porsche over almost killed you last week, then half a spoon of sugar most certainly will. Are you actually trying to give yourself another heart attack?’
Raphie reddened. ‘It was a heart murmur, Jessica, nothing more, and keep your voice down,’ he hissed.
‘You should be resting,’ she said more quietly.
‘The doctor said I was perfectly normal.’
‘Then the doctor needs his head checked, you’ve never been perfectly normal.’
‘You’ve only known me six months,’ he grumbled, handing her the mug.
‘Longest six months of my life,’ she scoffed. ‘Okay then, have the brown,’ she said, feeling guilty, shovelling the spoon into the brown sugar bag and emptying a heaped spoon into his coffee.
‘Brown bread, brown rice, brown this, brown that. I remember a time when my life was in Technicolor.’
‘I bet you can remember a time when you could see your feet when you looked down too,’ she said without a second’s thought.
In an effort to dissolve the sugar in his mug completely, she stirred the spoon so hard that a portal of spinning liquid appeared in the centre. Raphie watched it and wondered: If he dived into that mug, where would it bring him.
‘If
