“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Everything is just as it should be. Here, pick the music if you want.”
He grabbed a shoebox of old cassette tapes from the back seat and set it on my lap. I took the tape that was already sticking out from the deck in the dashboard, giving it a glance. It looked homemade, incomprehensible initials printed across the top of it in black Sharpie. I held it up, my eyebrows raised in question.
“Uh, not that one,” he said, picking it from my fingers and tossing it in the back. “That’s a bargain bin compilation I found, it’s a little rough. There’s other stuff in there.”
It was an eclectic selection of music. Bands I’d heard of, like Depeche Mode and The Clash and The Smiths, but then a lot that I hadn’t, which seemed to be more punk or metal if all the black design and jagged lettering was anything to go on. I held up a cassette featuring Cher on the front of it, her eyes closed, her hair big and her hand tucked inside her leather jacket. “Cher’s self-titled?”
He took it from me, removing the tape from its case and sliding it into the tape deck. “I can’t haveHeart of Stone,” he said. “No music after 1987 in the car, that’s the rule.”
It was a bit of a mistake, I realized after he’d turned the volume up where we could hear the music but still comfortably talk over it. This album was all about big emotions, and Cher wasted no time in getting right into it. Eamonn had only barely pulled onto a main street, drumming his fingers lightly against the steering wheel, and I already felt like my heart was in my throat.
He glanced over at me. “This drive would be prettier during the day,” he said. “When you could see the scenery better.”
There was something endearing about the way he always wanted things to be prettier for me, whether the flowers in the park or the scenery outside the car window. It was like he was both protective of his home country, wanting it to be its most impressive, and also like he wanted to impressme. I thought back to the women at the club, who’d all been thrilled I was leaving with someone. I hadn’t wanted them to think he was a stranger, but I also didn’t know how to explain that we’d just met, so in the end they seemed to think he was my Irish boyfriend and I let them.
Now there were lights strewn across the buildings we passed by, a stretch of clear road in front of us, and Cher singing about finding someone to take away the loneliness. It was hard to imagine this drive could be improved upon.
“I love night driving when I don’t have to drive,” I said. “And I can see well enough.”
Twenty-Two
We stopped for gas—well,petrol, as Eamonn called it—just outside the city. We grabbed a few snacks from the shop, all the things he said I had to try like Tayto crisps and a Curly Wurly chocolate bar. Once back on the road, he turned the heater on, and we started playing a game of trading off questions without explicitly saying that was what we were doing.
I asked more about the car, which made Eamonn light up and start talking about the condition he’d gotten it in, the things he’d done to fix it up, until he glanced over and seemed to realize that I only understood half of what he was talking about.
“Sorry,” he said. “This car is the closest thing I have to a hobby.”
“It sounds fun.” Not that it was a project I’d have taken on or had fun with, necessarily, but just that I could tell it hadbrought him some joy, and I liked the excited way he talked about it.
He asked me about Marisol, and I asked him about his sports allegiance since all I knew was that it wasn’t Liverpool. He asked about other places I’d traveled, and there was a brief flash of confusion on his face when my list was fairly short, after I’d made that whole thing about howIf you haven’t traveled, you haven’t lived.But he didn’t say anything.
I’d felt the way we were avoiding certain questions, almost like by mutual agreement we’d decided not to broach potentially incendiary topics. He didn’t question me any more about his brother, and I didn’t bring him up, either. There was one burning thing I’d been wondering about all day, though, and I didn’t want to make anything uncomfortable but I also wanted to understand him, and I felt like this was a crucial part.
“Can I ask,” I said finally, hesitating a little, “what exactly you went to prison for?”
He turned down the music until it was practically off. It hadn’t been that loud to begin with, so it felt more like the way that you turn it down when you need to concentrate on complicated directions.
“Ah,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to be coy about it. I would’ve told you. I only didn’t…” He swallowed, seeming to second-guess wherever that line of conversation was going to go. “It was for car theft. And arson.”
When I’d asked if it was for anything violent, he’d saidNot as such. The arson was theNot as suchpart, I supposed. Violence in its own way, depending on the circumstances. He’dsaid that he was guilty. “What happened?” I asked. “If you want to share it with me, I mean. You don’t have to.”
“It’s not that compelling a story,” he said. “Typical night out with the lads. We took a car, which was something we did then—this wasn’t our first time doing it. Usually we drove around, found somewhere to drink or take a hit of something, then left it for the guards to find and return to its owner. This time we drove it to the middle of a field, and set it on fire.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Why not,” he said, then gave me a look. “That sounds like I’m taking the piss, but it was the reason we did most of the stuff we did. Why not. I hot-wired the car. I didn’t start the fire, not that it matters, really. We were all there.”
“And you got caught?” A silly question—obviously they’d gotten caught. It was more that I wanted the story as to how.
“Lighting a fire has a way of calling attention to yourselves,” Eamonn said. “We weren’t in quite the condition to think about that part.”
I was silent for a long time, turning it all over in my head. It was a bad thing to do. I didn’t want to minimize that, or try to pretend otherwise, just because I met Eamonn ten years later and thought he seemed like a nice guy. Even if I knew how to hot-wire a car, which I certainly didn’t, it would never occur to me to take someone else’s property and destroy it as part of a fun night out with my friends. The kind of friends I’d had at that age were people who brought their crochet projects with them to our shared hotel room after prom.
“My mother was devastated by it,” Eamonn said. “The morning I went in for my sentencing even, we had a big row over my suit. She wanted me to wear a blue tie and I wanted to wear the same black one I usually wore for formal occasions, made some crack about how if this was my funeral I might as well. She didn’t like that, she—”
There was such pain in his voice, I suddenly knew that I hadn’t imagined it, that moment back at the church when I thought he’d gotten choked up. It was all there beneath the surface, waiting to bubble over, and I could almost feel his desperation to put it all back in.
“She didn’t like that,” he repeated after a moment, his voice steady again. “Sure look, that’s how it was.”
