All of a sudden Da looked wrecked. His face was the color of wet cardboard. He said, “I’m sick of the sight of you. Get out there and tell your ma I’m gasping for a cup of tea—and she’s to make it a decent strength, this time, not that piss she gave me this morning.”

I wasn’t about to argue. All I wanted was to grab hold of Holly and get the pair of us the hell out of Dodge—Ma would blow a blood vessel about us skipping dinner, but I had rattled Shay’s cage enough for one week, and I had seriously misjudged my family-tolerance threshold. I was already trying to decide on the best place to stop, on the way back to Liv’s, so I could get Holly fed and stare at that beautiful little face till my heart rate dropped back into normal range. I said, at the door, “I’ll see you next week.”

“I’m telling you. Go home. Don’t come back.”

He didn’t turn his head to watch me go. I left him there, lying back on his pillows and staring at the dark windowpane and pulling fitfully at loose threads with those misshapen fingers.

Ma was in the kitchen, stabbing viciously at an enormous joint of half-cooked meat and giving Darren hassle, via Carmel, about his clothes (“. . . never get a job as long as he’s running around dressed like a fecking pervert, don’t say I didn’t warn you, you take him outside and give him a good smack on his arse and a nice pair of chinos . . .”). Jackie and Gavin and the rest of Carmel’s lot were in a trance in front of the telly, staring slack-jawed at a shirtless guy eating something wiggly with a lot of antennae. Holly was nowhere. Neither was Shay.

Chapter 21

21

I said, and I didn’t care whether my voice sounded normal or not, “Where’s Holly?”

None of the telly crowd even looked around. Ma yelled, from the kitchen, “She’s after dragging her uncle Shay upstairs to help her with her maths—if you’re going up there, Francis, you tell them two the dinner’ll be ready in half an hour and it won’t wait for them . . . Carmel O’Reilly, you come back here and listen to me! He won’t be allowed to sit his exams if he goes in on the day looking like Dracula—”

I took the stairs like I was weightless. They lasted a million years. High above me I could hear Holly’s voice chattering away about something, sweet and happy and oblivious. I didn’t breathe till I was on the top landing, outside Shay’s flat. I was pulling back to shoulder-barge my way in when Holly said, “Was Rosie pretty?”

I stopped so hard that I nearly did a cartoon face-plant into the door. Shay said, “She was, yeah.”