I shook my head. ‘Who could do such a thing to him?’
‘I know. Desperate.’
‘He told me that I was not to worry about all this,’ she added, gesturing at her surroundings. ‘He said it was just because I was young.’ We let that hang in the air, both of us hoping Glynn was right. Aisling lowered her head. She didn’t quite know what to do with her hands, now that she’d been stripped of her amulets. The pyjama sleeves were too long for her.
‘It was too much for me,’ she quietly admitted.
‘I know,’ I said, as gently as I could manage.
‘It got too much for me, Declan,’ she confessed again some minutes later, looking me anxiously in the eye as if I would think less of her for this admission.
‘I understand,’ I said, as softly as I was able.
*
Giz was next.
I’d seen him just the once since the Pushers Out vigilantes broke his window and nailed that funeral wreath to our door. He’d been evicted shortly afterwards. I was walking back into town after a visit to Aisling when there he was on the north quays ahead of me. The pneumatic white runners were gone, replaced by an old pair of builder’s boots. They must have been weighted down with steel caps, the way he hauled them along the pavement, as if they were magnetised to it. No shoelaces, never mind socks. His left arm dangled limply by his side, and his left leg dragged, slightly twisted.
I trailed along behind him at a discreet distance. We made slow progress past the courts. He collided over and over with the railings. It was a beautiful, such a beautiful morning in late April, one of those gifts the world unexpectedly bestows on you, warmth and light flooding into your bones after the siege of an Irish winter, so long, so hard, so damp, that you’d forgotten how good the sun felt, the giddying glory of it on your bare skin. The railings turned a right angle, and Giz veered around the corner with them, involuntarily by the signs of it. His good arm reached for the other side of the street, flailing towards it like a swimmer caught in an undertow. I crossed briskly at the lights, pretending that I hadn’t seen him, nor heard the moan of appeal that indicated that he had seen me.
I glanced back from the safety of the other side. The broad splendour of the Liffey, glinting and sparkling in the late spring sun, the smoky blue of the distant mountains. Giz was still floundering by the railings, a stalled clockwork toy, needing to be turned around and set on his way again. He was making the noise, the junkie noise, a wheedling mixture of pleading and complaint, the terrible wa-aa-aa that was general all over Dublin during the heroin years, ringing out of every side street and back lane. Wa-aa-aa; how it carried.
During the numb, tentative weeks following Aisling’s hospitalisation, small acts of localised kindness gained a new significance in the order of things. I finally left my bed in the dead of the night and went out to see if I could comfort the dog that had been howling away the year, lonely as a wolf. I wanted to feel like a better person.
I followed the howl down a lane separating two rows of back-to-back terraces. I hadn’t considered what I would do if I found the dog. Talk to him, I suppose. Tell him he wasn’t alone. The lane rounded a corner and opened onto a clearing where I encountered not a dog but a group of men, too far away to have noticed my intrusion. No, not too far away, but too intent on whatever was squirming at their feet. They were lit from above by a security lamp rigged up to a garage.
One of the men spoke, and the dog stepped up his howling. A dogfight, was my first reaction. Another of the men nudged the creature on the ground with the toe of his boot, and the creature raised its hands in defence. Not a pit-bull terrier, but a boy, no wait, a man, a thin scrawny man, head shaved. He was on his knees, wheedling ingratiatingly though they hadn’t started on him yet. Merciful Jesus, it was Giz.
‘Wa-aa-aa,’ he was saying, palms upturned in supplication. The men started to laugh. They laughed for a good while at his distress, then Giz, the poor bastard, tried to join in. This brought abrupt silence. Even the dog stopped howling to listen.
One of the men said something, to which Giz shook his head in vigorous denial. The man kicked him. His foot caught Giz under the chin, snapping back his neck. That was the signal. The circle of men crumpled as if the ground had sucked them down on top of Giz. His screams were indescribable. I started to run, not to his rescue, but away from him, out of there, back to where I’d come from.
The first phone box had no dial tone. The cash lock had been jemmied open, ‘Giz woz ere’ scratched into the metal casing. The second phone box had no receiver at all. By the time I reached the third one, I knew there was no point in running any more. Whatever had been done to Giz was over with. I reported what I’d seen to the Guards.
I thought I’d never lay eyes on him again, and I wish I hadn’t. I opened the front door the next day to find him huddled on the doorstep, his arm crooked protectively under his chin like a broken wing. There was a pouch of purple blood beneath his eye. His lip was torn, teeth were missing, matted black clots studded his scalp. I didn’t look too closely. People on the street hurried past him. They’d been hurrying past him all morning.
I ran upstairs to phone an ambulance, then came back outside to sit with him on the doorstep until it arrived, afraid to touch so much as his finger in case it hurt him more. He had a horror of being touched anyway, a phobia, sparked by God knows what in his childhood. Giz did not regain consciousness during this period. It struck me as inappropriate that I was the one stifling tears, not him. What had I to cry about, after all?
The tune of an ice-cream van lilted past, and, some time later, the ambulance appeared.
‘Name?’ a medic with a clipboard asked me before they took him away, as if he were a parcel to be signed for.
‘Giz,’ I said.
The medic sighed and redistributed his weight. It was all a great trial to him. He inserted his biro into his ear and scratched. ‘Name?’ he said again.
‘Dunno.’
‘Address?’
‘None.’
They rooted through Giz’s pockets for identification. A set of nickel holy medals attached by a nappy pin to the washing instructions of his ratty tracksuit top was all they found.
*
I said goodbye to Faye and Antonia on the same day, or, rather, they said goodbye to me.
Guinevere phoned one morning. Such a long time since we’d spoken. When I heard her voice on the other end of the line, it was Glynn who immediately sprang to mind. Declan, he’s gone, I thought she was going to tell me. I closed my eyes and swallowed, surprised at the force of my reaction. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take of all this. But all Guinevere wanted to know was whether I’d like to join the others in the workshop that afternoon. ‘Just the four of us,’ she said.
I hadn’t been back to House Eight since the night that Aisling fell, presuming it would already be locked up for the year. No one was using it, not any more, not after all that had happened. But the door was open, and up the stairs I went, listening to the sound of female voices floating down. I had to stop halfway up, gripping the banister to compose myself: for a moment, it had been like the old days.
The three of them were sitting by the windows, sunshine streaming through their hair. I had never seen them in summer clothes before. Faye stood up when she saw me. ‘Declan,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad to get a chance to say goodbye to you before I leave.’
‘You’re leaving?’
‘Yes, I’m going home to Clonmel early. My train is at four.’ I had noticed the large suitcase by the door downstairs. Faye put her hand on her abdomen. ‘Declan, I’m going to have a baby!’