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She turned and leaned in to kiss his cheek but then moved to find his lips. He held her head, with his hands over her ears, so that all she could hear was the thumping of her heart, and he kissed her hard. With his thumbs, he caught and brushed away the tears that were streaming down her cheeks. She slipped her hands under his jacket, under his shirt, and held him tightly, clinging to the muscles of his back.
In that moment, there was nothing but pain. But it was pain that belonged to them both. It was pain that was worth something, that had value.
On the Métro, they didn’t talk, afraid that anything they said might break the invisible thread that was slowly tightening, winding them in. Their bodies rocked together to the rhythm of the train on the tracks. With her finger, Claire traced the inside seam of Ronan’s jeans, down to his knee and back up again. In the window opposite, his face was very still. She didn’t ask what he was thinking, but he must have felt her gaze. Their eyes, in reflection, met, and he smiled.
As they walked through the underpass, the same bearded man was leaning against the same pillar, using the same knife to clean his fingernails. He caught Claire’s eye and raised the same questioning eyebrow. She dipped her head in a nod of recognition. He grinned and nodded back.
At the big wooden gate, with his hand held up to the security keypad, Ronan turned to her.
‘I’ve blanked,’ he said. ‘What’s the number?’
‘5427.’
‘Right.’
He punched the numbers nervously, and again at the house door, and again, one final time, at the internal key box. As he fiddled the key into the lock, she stood on her toes to kiss his ear.
‘C’est bon,’ she whispered.
He turned and pulled her towards him, lifting her up, kissing her and holding her.
The door swung open, and they toppled through, laughing, into the dark.
Monday
Àvaillant cœur rien d’impossible.
To a valiant heart nothing is impossible.
Jacques Cœur
The Far End of West Cork
‘That’s very sad,’ said Fergal O’Connor to Seán, the border collie.
Fergal was finishing off a forbidden fried lunch. With one hand, he used his fork to dunk a chunk of a rasher first into ketchup and then into the yolk of his egg, spearing the lot onto a piece of bread with the expertise of long practice. He held his phone in the other hand and scrolled steadily with his thumb.
Last Dance in Paris, ran the headline, and beneath it was a grainy photograph of a man and woman dancing in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral. The man was holding the woman’s hand and she, a tall blonde, was twirling away from him. Her dress was swirling around her legs, and her hair was flying out, obscuring her face.
The text – a bit melodramatically, Fergal thought– reported that Harrison D. Carter, creator of the colossally successfulHot Saucetrilogy, had died suddenly. Carter, 55, was in Europe for the filming of his next mega-movie. Yesterday afternoon, the King of Car Chases was spotted cavorting on the street with an unidentified companion. Only hours later, Carter shockingly collapsed onto the cobbles of Place Vendôme. Despite speedy attention from French paramedics – and to the distress of horrified onlookers – the much-loved director failed to regain consciousness. Mr Carter was declared dead on arrival at hospital in the early hours of the morning.
‘Poor sod.’ Fergal looked again at the photograph. Something about the woman’s posture, the way she stood on her toes with her arm reaching upwards, was twitching a synapse in his memory. ‘Huh.’ He shrugged. ‘Something of nothing.’
Seán, running out of patience, contorted the muscles of his forehead, thus pulling his eyes to their most soulful setting, a trick which usually convinced his human to toss him a sausage.
‘Go away outta that, ya scrounger,’ said Fergal, putting his half-finished plate down on the ground.
He made a mug of tea and carried it with him into the workshop. A customer, a celebrity chef, was due to arrive within the hour, and Fergal wanted to have her knives ready. People spent two years on his waiting list; they didn’t expect to hang around while he gave the blades a final spit and polish.
He scrolled the list of music on his phone and selectedL.A. Woman. It was an album Lucy had banned him from playing. She was sick to death of it, she said. He didn’t mind. He might have got sick of it himself, eventually, if she hadn’t made it a source of pleasure to brazenly blast it at top volume whenever he was alone.
The set of three matching knives – Damascus steel with bog oak handles – was laid out on a strip of leather. Fergal’s first task was to engrave his signature at the hilt of each blade. It was a source of deep satisfaction to him, every single time. In school, he endured a plethora of profane nicknames – it was a hazard that came with his initials. Cut into a twelve-inch blade, however, FO’C wasn’t such a laughing matter.
Next, Fergal lifted a fine grit whetstone from its water bath and laid it on the bench. He took the smallest knife, and maintaining a careful fifteen-degree angle, he ran the blade in smooth, consistent passes across the stone, then flipped it over and made the same smooth movement along the other side. It was a quiet and soothing process. He took his time over it.
When the longest of the knives was honed, Fergal held the blade flat against the bare skin of his left forearm. He turned the knife so that the edge made the same fifteen-degree angle with the surface of his skin as it had with the sharpening stone. He resisted the urge to apply even the faintest downwards pressure. Fine, white scars in parallel tracks testified to the price of previous experiments.
His eye ran to the wider, less refined scar at the crook of his elbow. That one was made with the three-inch blade of a small penknife, and the making of it had been his first great act of defiance. He’d been trying to cut a way out for himself that day, into his real life, into a life that he could control. He remembered the last person he’d spoken to at that hell-hole school, and he remembered what she’d said. They’d struck a chord, those words.There must be a better way.As if the needle had been lifted and switched to a different groove, those words changed his thought pattern and made him think that maybe pain wasn’t the only reliable sign of life.
