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If Conor did return to his apartment, he never left any trail of it. The shower tiles were always dry. No steam clung to the corners of the little chipped mirror. Of the few bowls and plates, forks and spoons that Conor owned, they were always in the exact same position as I made note to leave them. I don’t know how he was getting fresh clothes. Was he sneaking over me, asleep on the floor, during the night? Was he coming in during the hours when he knew I was at Dublin Ink? Was he taking care to keep every piece hanging as it was in the closet? Because each night I fell asleep looking at the shadows on the folds like craters in the moon, the frayed edges hanging like moss. Each night I committed them to memory and each morning I awoke hoping they were different. Each night I returned to an empty apartment and it was the first thing I checked. They were always the same.
Conor was not coming home at all. What reason could I possibly see but me?
On the rarer and rarer occasions that I did see Conor at Dublin Ink, he was increasingly in a bad, volatile mood. He sent me off on long, arduous errands that felt more like goose chases than serious tasks. He snapped at me for not doing work that I’d completed hours earlier.
He not only refused to teach me even the basics of tattooing, but he forbid me from touching the equipment after claiming I carelessly handled one of the guns and broke something. When I dared to ask him what had I broken, he sent me to clean the bathrooms. Again.
I could hear Mason and Rian talking with him about me, but this always led to them fighting about me. Eventually I told Mason and Rian not to worry about it. As much as I was confused and hurt, I didn’t want to take from Conor what I myself would hope to hold onto for dear life should I ever have it: family.
“We’re worried about him,” Mason told me.
He’d even stopped bringing by his Miss Last Nights because Conor had grown so unpredictable. He showed up when he wanted, did work if he wanted, and was rude to anyone who tried to say anything about it.
“He’s never had the sunniest disposition,” Rian added in a lowered voice.
We were in the kitchen and even though the parlour was empty, Conor God knows where, no one seemed willing to talk any louder. “But this is different. This is…”
“Bad,” Mason said.
Rian glanced through into the living room which glowed neon pink in the dim. “I was going to say frightening.”
Conor’s irritability quickly extended to the customers. If someone peeked their head in timidly, he would shout, “In or out, asshole. This ain’t a peep show.” But the moment the person did walk in, he’d grumble, “Booked.”
“What?” came the inevitable response.
“Booked,” was all Conor would ever say. “All fucking booked.”
“How about—”
“Today, tomorrow, forever and ever, goddamn amen. Booked.”
If the person left, that was the end of it. If the person, however, dared to let his eye linger over the empty tattoo chairs, over Mason with his face buried in his hands or Rian staring blankly ahead or, worst of all, Conor, sharpening a pencil with a knife, then, well, it was far from the end of it. Conor would stand. Conor would yell. Conor would follow the poor guy out onto the sidewalk, gesture wildly with his arms before slamming the door on the way back inside.
“What the fuck has gotten into you?” Mason would sometimes growl. A fight would begin. Fists would even occasionally be raised. I don’t know if it was a good thing that things never came to blows; it felt like a gathering cloud that never relinquished its rain. It just grew and grew and grew.
Sometimes, though, Mason wouldn’t say anything at all. Those times, somehow, scared me the most.
Soon Dublin Ink hadn’t seen a customer in days. They were more than likely scared off by reviews that warned of a giant brooding asshole who turned away everyone. There was a recent crime spree in the neighbourhood and I don’t think Mason or Rian or I even once considered that this was the reason for the empty shop. We all knew the problem.
Nobody seemed to know what to do about it.
That morning the rain began early. A heavy mist at dawn at turned into a light drizzle by the time the tattoo parlour opened. By noon it was falling in sheets. It made the inside of the town house noisy. It made it feel claustrophobic as the tense silence seemed to only grow to compete with the rain. It also made us feel trapped. Trapped with a monster. There was nowhere to go and no one coming to save us. I was certain not even the mailman was dropping by in that weather.
Conor snapped at anyone who said anything. He upturned a tea kettle because I brushed too closely to him as he drew. Rian received his wrath for “looking in his direction”. Mason had to sneak a girl out while Conor went to the bathroom. His irritability was turned up to eleven along with impatience, his meanness, his pettiness.
I was nearing the end of my rope with him. I wasn’t going to take it much longer. Mason and Rian might have been afraid of confronting him, but I wasn’t. At least, not anymore now my anger had boiled over.
What’s more, Conor looked wretched. Absolutely wretched. He was pale. His skin was clammy. His fingers shook and his eyes were red-rimmed and unfocused. I caught him guzzling down shots of whiskey with a handful of pills in the kitchen.
Was I so fecking horrible that he had to medicate himself just to be around me for a few hours? What had I done that he had to turn to drugs?
“I’m going to talk to him,” I said in the kitchen to Mason and Rian.
I had no fear of Conor in the living room hearing me. The sound of the rain on the windows was so loud that I practically had to shout for the two guys in front of me to hear me. Mason threw a big arm over my shoulder.
“No,” he said with a sad smile, “you’re not.”
“Unless you want to make things worse,” Rian added. He was studying his tea leaves, turning the cup this way and that. He had been doing that for over an hour.
