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So I didn’t get away with lying about the book.
He wasn’t sure why this surprised him or why he expected it wouldn’t. Still, the embarrassment didn’t manifest in the way it would have done at the time.
“You think that was bad. I never once in my life got lunch money,” he told her like it was a feat of deprivation.
“Oh, Jesus. I thought I was bad getting a tenner a week.”
She held out her hand for the batter.
Everything went quiet in the pass-over, amplifying . . . something, until her shying eyes dipped back to the hob. Then conversation flowed again; her focus on the cooking, his, unequivocally, on her.
“I’d like to add to this contention of who was poorer that I never had a uniform that wasn’t a hand-me-down.” She said it as if this was enough to win the battle, and though he could never agree, he stayed quiet to hear her twanged voice reverberate off the cupboards. “Like some of those jumpers started with my oldest brother, Micheál, and came all the way down to me. Mam would soak them in the bath the week before school started to get the musk off.”
Áine poured the batter from a height onto the sizzling pan, too plentiful for Fionn’s liking. It made his face crease in several places. He rubbed his fingers over the lines on his head again where she’d touched him.
“You have an older brother, too, yeah? Is he well?” she asked.
Fionn leaned against the worktop with folded arms, equally happy and cocky that she’d remembered such a minor thing about him. That it was something she held onto over the years when her brain could have occupied that tiny space with more important things. Things that would never even enter his lesser mind.
What suddenly entered instead stole him of his smile . . . distorted his speech, “Ehh, yeah. Yes. He’s great,” he falsely enthused. “Living in Australia the last five years. Settled in Perth with a little wife and a baby.”
She flipped the second pancake with a louder sizzling splash Fionn was sure never happened when he cooked them.
“Little wife?” She asked.
“Little baby, I meant to say.” Heat pricked his ears, and he decided the redness might as well have stayed on them for the sheer amount of times it happened already tonight.
In any other social situation, he would have diverted the conversation from talk of finances or his less-than-great childhood, but Áine was different. Besides, if she asked any moreof Declan, his brother, he would have to tell her the one thing he was putting off tonight.
It was coming then, without charge, the honesty.
“It was shite though, wasn’t it? Never having money.” He began to tap his foot against the stainless-steel cupboard. “I know they say it builds character, but I think the ‘they’ in this context is just something rich people say to make themselves feel better about their frivolous expenditure.”
“A hundred-fucking-percent it was shit!” she agreed, spinning a humorous twist to their indignant suffering.
How very Irish he reckoned her in doing that.
She continued, “And not for the lack of material objects or sharing a bedroom with three other people. You grow accustomed to those things. I think it’s that we deserved better.”
You did anyway.
Fionn’s honesty pressed more, conditioned to be unleashed in her presence in a way he couldn’t quite decide to be good or bad. “Did you know the week of the Debs, I had to buy my suit in Tesco at half price and a size too big. It really mortified me.” It still mortified him, unlike the poetry book. “I got the bus to Waterford to buy it in case anyone I knew saw me in the local shop. My dad always said he’d buy me a suit to mark the occasion. Said it would come in useful if I ever needed to go to another funeral. To be fair, I was too young to carry Mam’s coffin, so the fleece did me for that one.” His mind trailed into the memory of her for a moment, her at the end—gaunt and pale. In some ways, the image of her unwell had taped over the memories of her before her sickness. “But yeah, he went to get the Credit Union loan for it, but lost it all to his horses by the time I got home from school.”
“God, that’s awful! I didn’t realise ye’ owned horses.”
Fionn’s neck recoiled far enough to cause him prickling discomfort. “No, backing horses, I mean.” It was surely thehisofFionn’s delivery that threw her. Like his dad was having an affair with horses in some twisted way, which always made Fionn say they were his.
“Sorry, I didn’t realise what you meant. An addict of what?”
Fionn wondered how she’d picked him up wrong considering she was there the evening of the attack. It was all coming back in droves now. Her intuition used to make conversations like this manageable for him because he struggled at times to say what he wanted, so he expected she might just catch on.
Which wasn’t fair. “Sorry, I’m not explaining it right. He was a . . . a gambling addict. Loved the horses. I swear he kissed the betting slips more than me.”
“Oh.”
The pity in her one-worded response forced his back into the worktop to the point of pain. He leveraged his heel to press it further. The worrying habit had him recall what his friend, Páidí, had told him to help with this: “It’s not your burden to carry the shame of your loved ones, lad.”
When Páidí hit his forties, he said to hell with his parents and their insecurities for what the parish would say about him being gay. Fionn believed him because he saw Páidí’s joy, his lipsticked, fingernail-painted joy now he was out, and had become one-half of the first same-sex couple to be married in Ireland since last year’s referendum.
