absorbed the lyrics of all the epic love songs he’d ever learned so that they became his doomed emotional landscape. Any girl he got off with instantly became ‘the one’ – cue a week of Van Morrison (early era), Stone Roses, The Sugarcubes. Then his intensity would scare her off, making her ‘the one who got away’ – cue a week of Van Morrison (late era), Nick Cave and Tom Waits in his locked smoky bedroom. If music be the food of love, Aidan ate only sweet ’n sour.
His self-inflicted lovelorn existence, coupled with the fact he didn’t drink or take an interest in sport, outcast Aidan from the rest of our circle. But his tendency to get depressed worried me, so I’d always kept in touch. When the cash-in-hand, hard-drinking madness of the North London Irish scene became too much, I ‘retired’ to South London and Aidan’s calm exile. ‘Be good training for when you move in with a woman,’ the lads joked.
Aidan’s emotional pogo would be too much for me tonight. I elected to walk home, nice and steady, so he’d be asleep by the time I got there.
The lightest of rain filled the air, cool and gentle, as if a weary cloud had sunk upon the road. ‘Soft rain, thank God,’ the old boys back home would say. The streets went slick. Car wheels sizzled like frying pans. The night buses groaned and closing time laughs rang hollow.
A lonely phone box cast piss-green light upon the wet pavement. I stared through the scratched glass at the grubby phone inside. I wanted to call her right now, badly. But how could I, at this time of night, after two long years?
I walked on, unable to fathom why seeing Marion’s body had affected me so much. God knows, like any young Irish adult, I’d seen more dead bodies than Ted Bundy’s chest freezer. It’s nothing sinister – at least not to us. It comes down to one stubbornly lingering Irish tradition: the Wake.
I remembered comedian Dave Allen’s line: In Ireland, death is a way of life. Whenever someone dies, we lay them out in their coffin and look at them for a few days. Tradition demands that the body is accompanied at all times until its ‘removal’ to the church. Cue an endless stream of relatives and neighbours through the house, a reservoir of tea, a landfill of sandwiches. From the age of seven or eight, every time a relative croaked it – and my extended clan was massive – you were hauled along to the Wake to say goodbye to someone you didn’t know who was already dead.
Before the corpse is displayed to all and sundry – usually in a bedroom or the sitting room of their home – some poor soul has to wrestle them into their Sunday best, wrench their eyes and mouth shut, apply make-up, and discreetly stuff cotton wool up their nostrils so that they don’t cave in. You never seemed to meet an embalmer socially.
In some homes, clocks are stopped at the time of death and all mirrors turned to the wall. Once the coffin is hauled into its display position, the family opens the window, to allow the deceased person’s spirit to leave. After two hours, they close the window, to ensure that the spirit doesn’t return. If you stand between the window and the body during this time, then God help you.
I shuddered at the memory of that open landing window tonight. Did Marion’s spirit pass through me?
I scolded myself for entertaining such superstitious nonsense. My thoughts turned instead to Marion. I knew that every square inch of her body would be poked and prodded, then photographed, scraped, swabbed or cut open. Body fluids, fingernail dirt and pubic hair would be sealed in plastic or glass and then passed, hand to hand, along the evidential chain; from pathologist to the laboratory, to the prosecution, to the court and to the jury. When you become the central piece of evidence in your own murder, there’s no dignity. Poor Marion – probably worrying about what to make for tea when she got to her front door. I tried to block out how she must have felt the moment she saw the knife. How could someone she knew do this to her?
Then I thought about Eve. Another blazing redhead ambushed by evil.
I rubbed my eyes. The soft rain had made my face all wet.
Eve Daly was more Irish-looking than any woman has a right to be: mischievous green eyes; a pale, sculpted face with just enough freckles; wild hair as red as the flesh of a blood orange. Sexy, curvy, five foot five in heels, her nose crinkled when she laughed, she smelled of pine needles and, when she came, her lips felt as cold and soft as fresh snow. And she was mine.
Eve’s daddy, Philandering Frank, had fled to London with his secretary three years earlier in a scandal that had seemed to delight everyone except his family.
Before his midnight flit, Frank had painstakingly stashed his fortune into a myriad of untraceable off-shore accounts, leaving the family penniless and saddled with a sprawling, heavily mortgaged bungalow. In an effort to save their home – and face – Eve’s mum, Mad Mo, and her two older brothers moved to New York. Once her clan had split, Eve felt like she was in Ireland on borrowed time, which is exactly how I felt. She was going to New York; I was bound for London – neither of us really belonged anymore. And so we became an island. Our romance flourished on a shared musical snobbery and a mutual disdain for pretty much everything and everyone around us.
On Saturday nights, we cemented our superiority at Rocky’s in Tullamore – ‘the Midlands’ hottest nightspot’ – where we perfected our disaffection and snorted with laughter and contempt at the music, the dancing and the fashion.
The girls sat on one side of the empty dance floor, dressed to repel adverse weather and stray hands. The DJ never warned them of ‘a slow set’ in case they scattered to the toilets. We’d watch in horrified fascination as local men walked the line in vain, seemingly immune to serial rejection.
On the other side of the dance floor, we identified two clear tribes of men: the Posers and the Poodles. The motto of the Posers seemed to be: if a piece of clothing rolls, then roll it. They wore Miami Vice-style pastel suit jackets (sleeves rolledup to the elbow), pink or blue t-shirts (arm sleeves rolled up to the pit), pegged jeans (scrunched up at the bottom, then rolled up: always twice), slip-on shoes (Oxblood moccasins with the natty little tassels), no socks (inexplicably spurning two glorious rolling opportunities) and mullet hair-dos.
On the other end of the scale: the heavy rocker types known as the ‘hard chaws’ who rode Honda 50s, head-banged (even during slow sets) and preferred to end the evening with a brawl. The Chaws had wholeheartedly embraced American Poodle Rock, which involved wearing your hair big and your denim bleached. The jeans were so tight they required zips in the lower leg to get on, or off, while the denim jackets were oversized, with obligatory rolled-up sleeves and US band badges on the back: Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses.
At the end of the night, we’d dare each other to order curry chips from Mrs Maguire’s rancid van: baulking at the peeled spuds in the rusty sink, her crusted black fingernails and the ringworm on her grease-creased forehead. But at two a.m., nothing in the world tasted better and, as exhaustive research had taught me, no one ever hits you when you’re holding a punnet of chips.
We’d walk back to hers, singing ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight’ while checking out the big sky for shooting stars. I didn’t know if I loved Eve, or if she loved me. But I loved life with her in it.
Before it all went so horribly wrong.
I got home just after eleven p.m., registered Aidan’s closed bedroom door with a silent fist pump and uncorked a bottle of red.
I flopped onto the couch without even switching on a lamp. My mood deserved the streetlight’s soothing amber gloom. I knew I’d have to ration my Shiraz and my irrational emotions for a longer stretch than usual tonight.
The worst part about insomnia is all the empty
