"No," I said. "No, I won't." I couldn't explain, I'm still not sure what made me so certain: this had been my ace in the hole, my one shot, and I had blown it. I put my face in my hands and sobbed like a child.
She didn't put her arms around me or try to comfort me, and I was grateful for this. She just sat there quietly, her thumb moving regularly on my shoulder, while I cried. Not for those three children, I can't claim that, but for the unbridgeable distance that lay between them and me: for the millions of miles, and the planets separating at dizzying speed. For how much we had had to lose. We had been so small, so recklessly sure that together we could defy all the dark and complicated threats of the adult world, run straight through them like a game of Red Rover, laughing and away.
"Sorry about that," I said at last. I straightened up and wiped my face with the back of my wrist.
"For what?"
"Making an idiot of myself. I didn't intend to do that."
Cassie shrugged. "So we're even. Now you know how I feel when I have those dreams and you have to wake me up."
"Yeah?" This had never occurred to me.
"Yeah." She rolled over onto her stomach on the futon, reached for a packet of tissues in the bedside table and passed them to me. "Blow."
I managed to work up a weak smile, and blew my nose. "Thanks, Cass."
"How're you doing?"
I caught a long shuddery breath and yawned, suddenly and irrepressibly. "I'm all right."
"You about ready to crash?"
The tension was slowly draining out of my shoulders and I was more exhausted than I'd ever been in my life, but there were still quick little shadows zipping past my eyelids, and every sigh and crack of the house settling made me jerk. I knew that if Cassie switched off the light and I was alone on the sofa the air would fill up with layers of nameless things, pressing and mouthing and twittering. "I think so," I said. "Would it be OK if I slept here?"
"Sure. If you snore, though, you're back on the sofa." She sat up, blinking, and started to take out her hair clips.
"I won't," I said. I leaned over and took off my shoes and socks, but both the etiquette and the physical act of undressing seemed way too difficult to negotiate. I climbed under the duvet with all my clothes on.
Cassie pulled off her sweater and slid in beside me, curls standing up in a riot of cowlicks. Without even thinking about it I put my arms around her, and she curled her back against me.
"Night, hon," I said. "Thanks again."
She gave my arm a pat and stretched to switch off the bedside lamp. "Night, silly. Sleep tight. Wake me up if you want to."
Her hair against my face had a sweet green smell, like tea leaves. She settled her head on the pillow and sighed. She felt warm and compact, and I thought vaguely of polished ivory, glossy chestnuts: the pure, piercing satisfaction when something fits perfectly into your hand. I couldn't remember the last time I had held anyone like this.
"Are you awake?" I whispered, after a long time.
"Yeah," Cassie said.
We lay very still. I could feel the air around us changing, blooming and shimmering like the air over a scorching road. My heart was speeding, or hers was banging against my chest, I'm not sure. I turned Cassie in my arms and kissed her, and after a moment she kissed me back.
I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.
17
For once I woke first. It was very early, the roads still silent and the sky-Cassie, high above the rooftops with no one to look in her window, almost never closes the curtains-turquoise mottled with palest gold, perfect as a film still; I could only have been asleep an hour or two. Somewhere a cluster of seagulls burst into wild, keening cries.
In the thin sober light the flat looked abandoned and desolate: last night's plates and glasses scattered on the coffee table, a tiny ghostly draft lifting the pages of notes, my sweater hunched in a dark blot on the floor and long distorting shadows slanting everywhere. I felt a pang under my breastbone, so intense and physical that I thought it must be thirst. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and I reached over and drank it off, but the hollow ache didn't subside.
I had thought my movement might wake Cassie, but she didn't stir. She was deeply asleep in the crook of my arm, her lips slightly parted, one hand curled loosely on the pillow. I brushed the hair away from her forehead and woke her by kissing her.
We didn't get up till around three. The sky had turned gray and heavy, and a chill ran over me as I left the warmth of the duvet.
"I'm starving," Cassie said, buttoning her jeans. She looked very beautiful that day, tousled and full-lipped, her eyes still and mysterious as a daydreaming child's, and this new radiance-jarring against the grim afternoon-made me uneasy somehow. "Fry-up?"
"No, thanks," I said. This is our usual weekend routine when I stay over, a big Irish breakfast and a long walk on the beach, but I couldn't face either the excruciating thought of talking about anything that had happened the previous night or the heavy-handed complicity of avoiding it. The flat felt suddenly tiny and claustrophobic. I had bruises and scrapes in weird places: my stomach, my elbow, a nasty little gouge on one thigh. "I should really go get my car."
Cassie pulled a T-shirt over her head and said easily, through the material, "You want a lift?" but I had seen the swift, startled flinch in her eyes.
"I think I'll take the bus, actually," I said. I found my shoes under the sofa. "I could do with a bit of a walk. I'll ring you later, OK?"
"Fair enough," she said cheerfully, but I knew something had passed between us, something alien and slender and dangerous. We held on to each other for a moment, hard, at the door of her flat.
I made a sort of half-assed attempt at waiting for the bus, but after ten or fifteen minutes I told myself it was too much work-two different buses, Sunday schedules, this could take me all day. In truth, I had no desire to go anywhere near Knocknaree until I knew the site would be full of noisy energetic archaeologists; the thought of it today, deserted and silent under this low gray sky, made me feel slightly sick. I picked up a cup of dirty-tasting coffee at a petrol station and started to walk home. Monkstown is four or five miles from Sandymount, but I was in no hurry: Heather would be home, with biohazardous-looking green stuff on her face and Sex and the City turned up loud, wanting to tell me about all her speed-dating conquests and demanding to know where I had been and how my jeans had got all muddy and what I had done with the car. I felt as if someone had been setting off a relentless series of depth charges inside my head.
I knew, you see, that I had just made at least one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I had slept with the wrong people before, but I had never done anything at quite this level of monumental stupidity. The standard response after something like this happens is either to begin an official "relationship" or to cut off all communication-I had attempted both in the past, with varying degrees of success-but I could hardly stop speaking to my partner, and as for entering into a romantic relationship… Even if it hadn't been against regulations, I couldn't even manage to eat or sleep or buy toilet bleach, I was lunging at suspects and blanking on the stand and having to be rescued from archaeological sites in the middle of the night; the thought of trying to be someone's boyfriend, with all the attendant responsibilities and complications, made me want to curl up in a ball and whimper.
I was so tired that my feet, hitting the pavement, seemed to belong to someone else. The wind spat fine rain in my face and I thought, with a sick, growing sense of disaster, of all the things I couldn't do any more: stay up all night getting drunk with Cassie, tell her about girls I met, sleep on her sofa. There was no longer any way, ever again, to see her as Cassie-just-Cassie, one of the lads but a whole lot easier on the eye; not now that I had seen her the way I had. Every sunny familiar spot in our shared landscape had become a dark minefield, fraught with treacherous nuances and implications. I remembered her, only a few days before, reaching into my coat pocket for my lighter as we sat in the castle gardens; she hadn't even broken off her sentence to do it and I had loved the gesture so much, loved the sure, unthinking ease of it, the taking for granted.