“It was a long time ago.”
“They weren’t the best years of your life, though.”
I had to roll my eyes at that, directing a playful exasperation at my own self. I knew I’d been being melodramatic, but what could I say, I’d gotten caught up in the moment. “You don’t even know what years they were.”
He started walking again, and I realized we’d been around this same block once before. He must’ve extended the walk, circling around our destination while I’d been going on my little rant.
“It doesn’t sound like you were happy,” he said. “So I know they weren’t the best ones.”
Fourteen
He took me to DublinCastle, which didn’t look like a castle the way I would’ve thought of it, but a square of imposing brick buildings around a central courtyard. It was massive, cobblestoned, and somehow open and enclosed all at once. There was a green copper dome on top of one of the buildings that I recognized as something I’d been seeing from a distance all day at various points along our walks.
“I thought you said no government buildings,” I said.
“Well, we canlookat ’em,” Eamonn said. “We just won’t try to go inside. I don’t even know what’s all here—the Treasury and other departments, some state rooms, the Chester Beatty library.”
I turned in a circle, taking it all in. I wondered how he was choosing the places to take me—so far, they’d seemed to be the kind of thing that would go on a tourist’s map of top sites in Dublin to see. It was oddly touching to me, that he seemeddetermined to give me the experience he thought I must’ve wanted from coming to this city.
“Have you read every one of those books back at your shop?” I asked.
It seemed like it took him a second to catch up, like we were so far removed from our first meeting back at his garage only a handful of hours ago that he didn’t know what I could be referring to. But then his face cleared and he gave a rueful smile.
“Not even close,” he said. “Those are books I’ve come across, some that I’ve read, most that I haven’t. I like the idea that they could have a new life, like someone could pick one up when bringing their car in and have something to read. They’re free for the taking.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s a really cool idea.”
“My personal books are upstairs, in my flat,” he said. “I keep those separate, and there are a lot fewer of them.”
I didn’t know why even the mention of his apartment felt unbearably intimate to me. That I now knew where it was, above his shop, that I could picture a shelf of books in there, him taking one down to read.
“When I was in prison,” Eamonn said, “I started reading all the time. I’d always liked books, but suddenly they became everything to me. Head down, work wherever they had me, walk the yard, read a lot. It’s hard to explain the worst parts of prison. It’s like every day is the same, and you have very little to do with any of it, you just go where they tell you to when they tell you to. Most of the rooms don’t have clocks, and the ones that do are often wrong, and it starts to fuck with you just not knowing whattimeit is. It’s so boring it makes you tired,but then you’re also always vigilant, and that makes you bone-tired. Books were a way out of that, a way into something new and different every time I opened one up.”
“A way to escape into other worlds,” I said. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“Other worlds,” he said, “but also back into the actual world, the one out there. I thought about the people who wrote those books a lot, I liked to imagine them sitting at their typewriter or scratching a word out in pen, that kind of thing. That there were all those people out there who had something to say and now here I was readin’ it, sometimes long after they were dead.”
We passed by a poster with an illustration of what Dublin Castle had looked like in medieval times, the turrets and fortifications. Eamonn stared at it for a beat but didn’t seem to really see it.
“So books got you through it,” I said, thinking back to what he’d said earlier, about the rain.Something you know you can get through. I had the feeling prison was a little more than a cold rain.
“There were other things,” he said, still looking at the poster. “Some I took advantage of, some I didn’t. I got my Leaving Cert—I’d dropped out of school after getting my Junior. I’d write letters for some of the fellas, ’cause they knew I was always at the library and so they’d ask me, but otherwise I tried to keep myself to myself. There were some decent people in there, and I think they could’ve helped me more, if I’d let them.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what Eamonn was referring to, if therewas something specific he would’ve needed help with, or if it was incarceration in general. I wondered if, on some level, this was his way of testing me, too. If he was purposely dropping all this about his past, wanting to see what I’d do with it.
“How long were you in for?”
“Three years.” He’d stepped up onto a low stair in front of an arched doorway to one of the buildings, making him even taller than usual, until he hopped back down again. “I was also nineteen. My own life-cleaving-in-two moment, I suppose.”
Those seemed like a hard three years to spend in prison. Not that there were any easy ones, but to be right on the cusp of adulthood like that, to have just become a man but still have such a recent memory of the boy in you. Eamonn seemed to sense the direction of my thoughts, because he stopped, turning to face me.
“I deserved it,” he said. “The time, the slop food, sleeping on the floor when it was overcrowded, the nonstop noise, the fuckingsmells. Anything I got. I did it, every single thing I was charged with. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to play at being some innocent, reading my little books in my prison bunk. It was tough inside, and I thought I was tough outside, getting into scraps and out late with the lads, skipping school, giving my mam a hard time. I was out of control then. A weekend was for drinking and partying, loud music and a bit of ecstasy, and a Monday morning was for fuck all. I’d managed to land a good apprenticeship at a local garage when I left school, and I didn’t even do right by that.”
But look at what you’ve made for yourself, I wanted to say. He’d obviously built a life since then, with the shop and theapartment upstairs with all his books. He seemed like a success story to me, albeit one that came out of some less-than-ideal circumstances. But ultimately I didn’t know anything about his life and had no right to comment on it, good or bad.
“You definitely met the better brother first,” Eamonn said. “Niall’s always had his shit together, since we were kids. Went to college, got a good job in America, did our mam proud. With my record, they wouldn’t let me so much aslookat the Statue of fucking Liberty.”
Eamonn’s a waste. That was what Niall had said back on our date, about his own brother. Meanwhile his brother was over here trying to sell me onhim. It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that while Eamonn might’ve been the one busted for shoplifting as a seven-year-old, it was his thirteen-year-old brother who’d put him up to it in the first place, so maybe it didn’t say much that Niall had kept his nose clean all these years.
