Bronagh's Confessional (Part two of five)

If this is to be a proper confessional, let’s have it all out. My indecision, which acted like a spanner to some unlucky girl’s head, is the least of it. I’ll dump all my sins on the desk for you to pick over and judge, before I staple them all together and send it up to Garda HQ in Phoenix Park. How would that be? All right with you? Fine, so here’s the next bit:

I’m a stalker, too.

For the longest time, I’ve convinced the righteous part of myself that still resides inside the uniform that I was just looking out for my best childhood friends. See them home safe, throw Róisín’s bike in the back whenever she was too pissed to ride it up the hill. The respect I never got when I wore a dress stiffened my spine whenever I put on the polyester blues. The change made me feel like Castletownbere’s own Jane Law, squinting at all criminals and good townsfolk in the manner of that parched Marshal on Gunsmoke.

The stalking, right, sorry. I was about to tell you about the first time I laid eyes on Darling Jim Quick. Because it just happened to be the same evening that I followed Fiona to the town square like some beggar hoping for beer change. The sun was setting, transforming our town into the kind of coral-pink postcard that Finbar’s estate agency sold as physical reality to foreign dullards with cash for brains. His Mercedes looked like someone had turned an oyster shell inside out and coated the metal plates with the residue. It was glorious.

But it was Finbar I’d come for on that late afternoon. I’d come for a memory.

Finbar was handsome in a way most girls never noticed. Long before he started buying neckties made by Italians whose names he could never pronounce, his patient silence made him sexy to me. He listened to truths, lies, and to the kind of vague prayers that seep out whenever anyone has had one too many to count. Fiona called him her lie detector. I didn’t call him anything.

For I had kissed him first, you see.

Not much of a kiss, if you must know, but it meant something to me that went beyond bragging rights in a town the size of a telephone booth. Running dead last with a crew that included the Walsh sisters meant always getting picked last, and, usually, not getting noticed at all. But Finbar did notice me, as it turned out. And before I even took the Garda exam and shined my first badge, we went to dinner up in Cork. Rabenga’s. Italian, I think, but I never touched the food. He listened to my doubts about joining the Guards, and his gaze held me steady. He squeezed my hand and fumbled as he kissed me goodbye at the door afterward. I was happy as the German car silently rolled away. When I went to bed, I dared to imagine me and him together somewhere else. In New York, maybe. Or even just Dublin. I dreamt of things I won’t even tell you. You’ll just laugh at me for trusting you with it.

And then Finbar noticed Fiona, didn’t he? I suppose it was inevitable.

Sure. They’d been together for over a year. And on that particular evening, as I sat behind the wheel of my patrol car two houses away pretending to talk on the radio, I saw them holding hands in the café. I zipped up my jacket and hated him more than her, to be honest. And no, I wasn’t moping in that “Why not me?” chorus you might expect from a girl wearing a size ten while hoping for something slimmer. I hated my own poor timing. I left as they came out the door, arm in arm. As they parted, Finbar smiled like Fiona had just said something he was still thinking about and didn’t like as much as he let on. Jaysus, did I miss Marshal Dillon’s six-shooter at that moment, pistol belt, big hat and all.

My radio saved me. Or so I thought.

“Good craic down at the bar round ten,” came Jonno’s voice. A wise man whose false teeth belied his truer heart. He had given me boy advice when I was younger, not that it had ever helped anyone get into or out of my knickers, sad to say. “We have a seanchaí coming by, if you want to hear a story,” he continued as I saw Fiona pedaling past on her bike. I resisted the impulse to open my car door to make her swerve. A seanchaí. A teller of tales. Usually manky old men in tattered sweaters and felt hats that were meant to give them credibilily as sages, instead of identifying them as unemployed farts. But I told Jonno I’d go. I owed him that much. As I glimpsed Finbar’s Mercedes gliding in the opposite direction, I could taste the phantom spaghetti sauce from that night at Rabenga’s on a long ago kiss I was probably the only one of us who still remembered.

So when I saw the young man in his leather jacket up on Jonno’s shabby little podium, my face flushed with something more than surprise.

Jim Quick, that’s what he called himself.

He spoke a little too low for everyone to hear, which made even Róisín shut it. Jim had put his pulse on everyone in Jonno’s bar. Men, women, dogs and the rest of it. Don’t ask me where I got the nerve, but as he began to tell his tale about ancient castles and two cursed brothers, I interrupted him with a question. I felt like an eejit right away.

“Did the castle have a name?” I heard myself wanting to know. That was a lie. I wanted him to tell me something about himself. Anything at all would have made me happy that night. He winked, deflected my enquiry and continued. And, as it usually happened at McSorley’s Bar, his gaze inexorably landed on the Walsh sisters’ carelessly beautiful features as the story took shape like smoke from a campfire.

It was then that I resolved to be nobody’s fourth sister. I felt nothing but hate.