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“The click-or-is, silly,” Ollie said, and then frowned. “Teacher said that only girls get a click-or-is, but that’s not fair, is it, Joe? How comes they get a secret button, and we don’t?”
“O-ee poos!” Sean hollered from the utility room, and I had never been so relieved to clean shit up than I was in this moment.
“Coming, Seany,” I called back before saying, “Ols, we can pick this conversation back up when you’re a teenager.”
HOUSE CALLS AND DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES
DECEMBER 10TH 2004
AOIFE
Beingin love with someone who was hell bent on self-destructing was such a lonely place to exist. I felt incredibly helpless, watching on as my boyfriend buried his secrets with lie upon countless lie.
Iwantedto save him.
I felt like I was watching him drown. That I was desperately reaching my hand out, but his pride was so potent that it meant he would rather go under than let me pull him to safety.
I knew he wasn’t clean.
Hadn’t been since the day after Halloween when I had made the fatal decision of admitting to him that his father had made another pass at me.
I physically watched the light in his eyes leave that day, and nothing I’d been able to say or do since had been able to reignite that spark.
I could see it on his face every day.
He was slowly slipping back into old habits, and I was afraid to push back against his behavior, for fear that it would make it worse.
Makehimworse.
I was so afraid of him ending up dead in a ditch somewhere, that I found myself, disgustingly, turning a blind eye when he came back from lunch with bloodshot eyes and a faraway look in his eyes.
But there were two things that I was absolutely sure about when it came to Joey.
The first; it wasn’t uncommon for him to skip a day or two of school.
The second; when it came to his job at the garage, he was the complete opposite,
Never mind being uncommon, when it came to his job, the boy’s rap sheet was virtually nonexistent.
It was for these reasons that I found myself incredibly concerned over the fact that he had missed almost two whole weeks of schoolandwork.
To be fair, he had returned all of my text messages and phoned me for a chat every night, fobbing me off with the reason for his absence beingfamily business, andnothing to worry about.
Of courseI was worried.
All I seemed to do nowadays was to worry about him.
The fact that he had refused to meet up or let me come over had unsettled me to the point of blind panic.
Which was why, by the time the second Friday he missed school rolled around, I drove straight to his house after my shift at work. I needed to see with my own eyes what he had been assuring me nightly on the phone. That he hadn’t slipped up to the extent he had last September.
What I didn’t expect to find when I got there was a Garda car.
Panic immediately setting in, I hastily parked my car at the side of the road and jumped out of the car.
“What’s going on?” I asked a group of women, who were standing at the wall in their dressing gowns, smoking cigarettes. “What happened?”
“Domestic disturbance, apparently,” one of them said.
