IN THE WOODS

4 of Chapter 1

She had as studio flat, which is what landlords call a bedsit where there is room to have a friend over, on the top floor of a semi-dilapidated Georgian house in Sandymount. The road was quiet; the wide sash window looked out over rooftops to Sandymount beach. There were wooden bookshelves crammed with old paperbacks, a low Victorina sofa upholstered in a virulent shade of turquoise, a big futon with a patchwork duvet, no ornaments or posters, a handful of shells and rocks and chestnuts on the windowsill.

I don't remember very many specifics about that evening, and according to Cassie neither does she. I can remember some of the things we talked about, a few piercingly clear images, but I could give you almost none of the actual words. This strikes me as odd and, in certain moods , as very magical, linking the evening to those fugue states that over the centuries have been blamed on fairies or witches or alien, and from which no one returns unchanged. But those lost, liminal pockets of time are usually solitary; there is something about the idea of a shared one that makes me think of twins, reaching out slow blind hands in a gravity-free and wordless space.

  I know I stayed for dinner---- a studenty dinner, fresh pasta and sauce from a jar, hot whiskey in china mugs. I remember Cassie opening a huge wardrobe that took up most of one wall, to pull out a towel for me to dry my hair. Someone, presumably her, had slotted bookshelves inside the wardrobe. The objects: I didn't get a proper look, but there were chipped enamel saucepans, marbled notebooks, soft jewel-colored sweaters, tumbles of scribbled paper. It was like something in the background of one of those old illustrations of fairytale-cottages.

I do remember finally asking, "So how did you end up in the squad?" We had been talking about how she was settling in, and I thought I had dropped it in pretty casually, but she gave me a tiny, mischievous smiles, as though we were playing checkers and she had caught me trying to distract her from a clumsy move.  

"Being a girl, you mean?"

"Actually, I meant being so young," I said ,although of course I had been thinking of both.

"Costello called me 'son' yesterday," Cassie said. "' Fair play to you, son." Then he got all flustered and stammery. I think he was afraid I'd sue."

"It was probably a compliments, in its own way, " I said.

"That's how I took it. He's quite sweet, really." She tucked a cigarette in her mouth and held out her hand; I threw her my lighter.

"Someone told me you were undercover as a hooker and ran into one of the brass," I said, but Cassie just tossed the lighter back to me and grinned.

"Quigley, right? He told me you were an M16 mole."

"What?" I said, outraged and falling straight into my own trap. "Quigley is a cretin."

"Gee, you think ?" she said, and started to laugh. After a moment I joined in. The mole thing bothered me----if anyone actually believed it, they would never tell me anything again---and being taken for English infuriated me to an irrational degree, but I sort of enjoyed the absurd idea of me as James Bond.

   "I'm from Dublin," I said. "I got the accent at boarding school in England. And that lobotomized bogger knows it." Which he did; in my first weeks on the squad he had pestered me so monotonously about what an England guy was doing in the Irish police force, like a child poking you in the arm and droning "Why? Why? Why?" that I had finally broken my need-to-know rule and explained the accent. Apparently I should have used smaller words.

"What are you doing working with him?" Cassie asked.

"Quietly losing my mind," I said.

Something, I'm still not sure what, had made up Cassie's mind. She learned sideways, switching her mug to the other hand (she swears we were drinking coffee by that stage and claims that I only think it was hot whiskey because we drank it so often that winter, but I know, I remember the sharp pongs of a clove on my tongue, the heady steam), and pulled up her top to just under her breast. I was so startled that it took me a moment to realize what she was showing me: a ling scar, still red and raised and spidered with stitch marks, curving along the line of a rib. "I got stabbed," she said.