Brid had a half cup of coffee in front of her. She didn’t look up but kept writing, her head sideways on her palm.
“Still at it,” he said. She nodded.
“Is Aisling asleep?”
Brid’s writing slowed, and she wagged the pen from side to side. She seemed to be trying to think what way to phrase something.
“The usual marathon,” she murmured. “I must have conked out with her.”
Fanning looked at the sinews that stood out on the back of her hand as her pen sped up again. The sleeve of her T-shirt had rolled up over her upper arm. He saw the outline of her bra strap. Caravaggio, he thought, and Rembrandt, the shadow on the light from the table lamp she preferred to work by. Her T-shirt had shrunk and he saw the small of her back, the channel of her spine pushing against her skin. He stepped closer and began to massage the muscle that stood out over her collarbone.
She put the pen down slowly and lifted her head and turned to him.
“Well,” she said.
“I might be on to something,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes as though to assess him more exactly.
“The crime story,” he said. “The script.”
“Your research,” she said.
Resentment crushed his stirring lust.
“Yes, a character. Well, a guy who seems to have an inside…”
“Insight, did you say?”
“Inside.”
“You have one already don’t you?”
“He wasn’t my first choice. I knew he was a gobshite.”
He tried to read her comments on the paper she was marking. The Irish Monastic System.
“Well we’re not short on iijits in Dublin.”
“Well this seems to be more of what I need.”
“Really.”
“I think he’s different.”
“How so.”
“It’s hard to describe. He sets a tone. Scary guy, perhaps.”
He saw that now.
“Perhaps?”
“Who knows,” he said. Her T-shirt had slid up at the front too.
“You like that.”
She didn’t look up, or even pause, when she said it.
“It’s not exactly ‘like,’” he said. “Come on.”
“Come on yourself,” she retorted, almost kindly. “You get a kick out of meeting people like him. The more dangerous, the better. A thrill.”
“No, actually. I am not ‘thrilled’ to meet him.”
She smiled briefly.
“It’s nothing to be guilty about.”
“Did I say I felt guilty?”
“He’s a criminal though, isn’t he.”
“Well that’s a funny thing, isn’t it. I actually don’t know.”
“Hit a tender spot there, did I.”
The warmth was gone from her voice, he realized.
“Whatever. The thing is, there’s something about him that you catch on to right away. If you’re careful, I mean. He strikes me as smart. Disciplined or something.”
“Well that’s a nice change.”
“He’s not a slob. A careful sort of guy, I think. A planner.”
She looked down at the papers in front of her.
“You’re getting a crush on him, are you.”
“Well maybe I will then.”
“Is he your run-of-the-mill Dublin gangsta?”
“I haven’t quite figured out,” he said.
“How hard could it be? Dis dat dese and dose. Gimme dis, givis dat.”
“A few times he sounded English, actually. ‘Innit?’ ‘Roight.’”
“Man of mystery then.”
She’d go on, he knew, until he’d react.
“He could deliver on bits that are weak now. The way he talks even.”
“Grit.”
Perhaps she wasn’t taking subtle digs at him, he thought.
“Not that, more weight, sort of. A bit of gravitas, I was going to say, but that would be stupid. I mean, face it, it’s probably criminal, whatever it is.”
“Your Mista Gangsta.”
“Okay, I get it. Loud and clear. Thanks.”
She folded her arms. He imagined her breasts held there just as they would be when she’d lie on him.
“We’re close,” he said then. “With this story, I know it. It’s not science. But you know it when it shows up.”
“Aren’t you getting that in with the Guards? You know, go around in a squad car or sit in a session with some of them?”
“It’s not about them, the Guards. Principally, I mean.”
Brid craned her neck and became very still. Fanning listened too. It was people in the other flat.
Brid slumped back in the chair. She drew her hair back with both hands. “Aisling was soooo wound up,” she said. “Whatever’s bothering her.”
“You’re finished are you?” he asked.
She eyed him. He eyed her back.
When she had started teaching, he used to make her laugh in that embarrassed way that excited him even more. “If your students could see you now…” but then after a while she had asked him to stop saying it.
“I’m finished all right. In more ways than one.”
“Go to bed why don’t you.”
“Would I actually be sleeping?”
He was confused again. A sly smile about to break out on her face, or a put-off?
“Whatever the lady wants,” he said.
“What this lady wants, can’t be got.”
“Never hurts to try.”
“Okay. Aisling’s teething to be magically disappeared, for starters. The iijits in my History class, the one they dumped on me, to know how to spell and to write a sentence, an original sentence. Less marking would be next. Less of a control freak for a principal.”
“How about: it to be the day before the summer holidays.”
“That goes without saying.”
“Do you remember the desert?” he asked. “The Painted Desert place?”
She yawned, and nodded, and yawned again.
“Be nice to do that again.”
“With Aisling?”
“Why not?”
“What would she do while we chalk up hundreds of miles in New Mexico, or whatever?”
“There are kids in the States, you know.”
“Oh, a commune?”
“Come on. It’d be good for her. Remember we always wanted to keep going, not just turn into ‘the parents.’”
She pulled over another paper.
“Christ,” she said quietly. “Monastric. He actually wrote that. Monks doing tricks? Gastric, monastic. Spastic. Hello? Spell check, anyone?”
She pushed it away, looked up at him, and smiled.
“I got an email from Lizzie. Things are heating up.”
Lizzie, he thought. The downer sister-in-law, the one without an ounce of talent, doggedly spending years trying to “break into acting.” Her latest diversion was dating a director who had showed promise with a surreal cartoon about Dublin night-life.
“Well good for her. Is she up to it?”
“More to the point, is he? He’s fiftysomething.”
“I saw his name in credits going back to St. Patrick: “Director — Joe Rattigan.”
“Well he’s still a biggish wheel.”
“All those wankers. ‘I could pass your name on to Colm Breen, Colm and I go back a long way.’”
“Age hasn’t dimmed your kind regard, I see.”
“I’m talking about when I was a kid, even. Well, a teenager.”
“Lizzie says the separation from his wife made a teenager out of him. Spare me the details, I told her.”
He knew there were bottles of Heineken left from the weekend, but they were in the cupboard. Still, he’d drink one.
“She says he’s not the way people think. ‘Joseph’ he likes to be called.”
Fanning walked slowly to the doorway and leaned against it. Brid sighed and sat up and opened the paper again.
“Why are you telling me this,” he said.
She seemed surprised.
“Lizzie happens to be my sister. Anyway. It’s just talk.”
“Networking, are we?”
“Maybe. What of it?”
“Leave me out of it.”
“Did I say you were in it? In what, anyway?”
“You know. ‘Putting in a good word for good old Dermot Fanning.’”
“Is that what you’re thinking? Really?”
“Some of it, yes. It’s not like, well, you know.”
“‘It’s like it’s all about me’?”
“Give me a break, Brid. Christ’s sake.”
“I will if you let me take you out for a pint with Lizzie and him.”
“A pint,” he said, “with Joe Rattigan. I’d sooner kick myself in the head.”
“Well there you go. True to form, anyway.”
“That was a setup.”
“You mean self-sabotage. That’s what I’m hearing. Again.”
“Don’t we have a deal, that we never use crap words like that? Like the shite you have every day in school? Empowerment, facilitate — all that bullshit?”
Brid stared at him.
“Why are you raising your voice?”
“Because, because I’m annoyed. Is that still allowed?”
She blinked several times and then abruptly returned to her marking. He watched her but she did not look over. Soon she was absorbed in what she was reading. He took two bottles from the cupboard.
“I’ll do an hour or two,” he said, “at the desk.”
The desk was a family heirloom passed on from his great-grandaunt, a teacher all her life in Waterford. The desk had become his magic carpet, his portal. He’d even drilled a hole to bring the laptop’s cable into the drawer.
He slowed as he passed her. She dropped her pen and reached out around his waist.
“Just let me do it,” she murmured, “Joe knows your work. Lizzie already asked him about you.”
It was almost more than he could muster to wait with her and to caress her hair. He knew early on there’d be no chance tonight anyway. The desire had left him quite suddenly, and in its place was the familiar, dense unease.
Things used to be different, was all he could think.