"That's an eighth," he said. "I'll make it fifteen. Seeing as how I know you."

"You're a sweetheart." He could have been bluffing, or he could have pulled a second king. It wasn't likely, I'd pulled one myself, but I didn't have anything to back up the tens. And he could have just been having a laugh, knowing we'd end up smoking the dope anyway. It was hard to tell what he was thinking from the wrong side of his shades. He was sitting back, relaxed, like he was waiting to thumb a lift on the next glacier pa.s.sing through.

"He's spoofing, Harry." Celine, head on my shoulder, eyes closed. Not needing to look to guess that Gonzo was on a bluff.

"No speech play," Gonzo intoned, mechanical. He grinned at me. "Fifteen to you, Harry time for steel b.a.l.l.s."

"Let Celine have her say." The pot wasn't worth throwing fifteen quid away, but I wanted him to think I was tempted, make him sweat for it. Besides, I liked to hear Celine talk, liked it so much I'd asked her if she was interested in talking at the top of an aisle. She said she'd talk about if we talked about getting a place together. Once we moved in we talked about everything except getting married, but we were getting around to it, and sooner rather than later.

"Sting the f.u.c.ker," she murmured.

Dutchie and Chizzer took a bet on whether Gonzo was bluffing. Mich.e.l.le started shuffling the cards, impatient.

"C'mon, Harry," Gonzo said. "Call it, or I'll be showing Celine my b.a.l.l.s of steel."

That she didn't like, and edge in her voice.

"Take him to the cleaners, Harry. Teach him some manners."

He just laughed at that. Mich.e.l.le pppffffed, threw the cards on the table, climbed down off her barstool.

"Anybody for a fresh one?"

"I'll have a cider," I said, throwing the cards on the table. "All yours, Gonz. Take it home."

Gonzo flipped the shades up, cackled harsh, turned over his cards, no king. Celine shook her head, disgusted. Chizzer took Dutchie's fiver. I watched Gonzo's eyes, dead and shiny, a double eclipse.

"Play the player, Harry, not the cards." He raked in the cash, jabbed a forefinger in my direction. "Lesson number one."

"Send me the bill." He was about to kick off, you could always tell with Gonzo. I needed to get away from the table. "Deal me out, I'm giving Mich.e.l.le a hand with the beers."

"Work away." He nodded at Celine. "I'll show blondie some real stud while you're gone."

"a.s.shole."

She sounded tense.

"Change the record, Gonz," I said, but he left the needle in the groove. I took off to the bar, he followed, one thing led to another and from nowhere Gonzo swung his bottle. It broke my arm, but only because I had my arm up to protect my face. When I fell back against the bar he freaked, coming at me with the broken neck of the bottle. I grabbed for his wrist and he battered me with his free fist until Dutchie and Chizzer jumped him.

It took both of them to hold him down. Mich.e.l.le and Celine bundled me into the car, drove to Casualty. It took three or four hours to see a doctor, another couple for them to X-Ray my arm, set it in plaster. By then Gonzo had calmed down, which was just as well, he was the only one waiting when I came out of the cubicle. We sat in the car, smoking, burning off the hospital smell.

"Something I want to say," he muttered.

I was touched by his penitent tone and then it all kicked in, the dope, the broken arm, the early hour. I realised that it couldn't have been easy for him, my moving in with Celine. Gonzo and I had been living together for nearly twenty years, wards of the state after a drunk driver orphaned us. All our lives we'd been shunted from one inst.i.tution to another, being f.u.c.ked over by staff, or bigger kids, or teachers who knew they could vent their frustrations because no one gave a f.u.c.k about us back home.

We'd grown up and grown hard, fighting the odds and always losing, but one thing we never did, we never took it lying down. An allergy to penicillin was about all we had in common, but he was my kid brother and all through the bad years, even during the ha.s.sle from the Dibble, the Provo threats when Gonzo started dealing, nothing had prised us apart. But even that doesn't tell you how close we were.

"I wanted to tell you," he said, "that I f.u.c.ked Celine."

I didn't kill him. That's how close we were.

The worst thing was the way he smiled when he said those words. It was a canine smile, dead and dry. I sat there, dumb, the cigarette smouldering as I read the No Smoking sign on the glove compartment over and over again. Not knowing if I should laugh or cry or kick someone's head in. Celine's, preferably, but Gonzo's would have to do because you don't hit a woman. Not even if she's dug her talons in deep, ripped your guts out, so you don't have to go to the bother of puking them up whole.

After that night I knew only two things for sure. One, you play the player, not the cards. Two, I would never, in my entire life, be as happy again as I was before Gonzo said those three simple words, 'I f.u.c.ked Celine'.

It took me a while to realise that Gonzo smiled that way because he was relieved I finally knew. Not about Celine, that was the first and last time Gonzo and Celine got it together, although it was the kind of once that tends to last. Gonzo wanted me to know what he was really like, what he was capable of, who he really was. I'd always known he was erratic, even begun to suspect that he was actually a sociopath, gone so far as to get a book out of the library and check off the symptoms. But I'd never thought there was a vacuum at his core.

When he smiled that night though, I knew there was no line he wouldn't cross. Gonzo had screwed Celine simply because he knew Celine was the only woman I had ever considered living with, having kids with, getting old with. Maybe even being happy with.

Celine cried for a week solid but I hung tough, moved out of the apartment, sleeping on Chizzer's couch for a couple of weeks until I found a bed-sit down near the docks. It was just about big enough to let me exhale all the way out but I didn't mind, I wasn't planning any dinner parties.

After a month or so Gonzo called around and after a couple of false starts we kissed and made up over a bottle of Southern Comfort, Ritz mixer, because, come h.e.l.l or high hippies, Gonzo was my brother and we had no one else. All the while I knew that s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g Celine was only part of it, that Gonzo needed my feedback to fully enjoy his sick kicks. I ignored the self-loathing by hating Celine. Not blaming her, just hating. Sometimes you just need to hate.

It would have been neat and tidy if I'd met Denise on the rebound but it was nearly a year later when I walked into the bank, got skewered by a bold gaze, big brown eyes. The smile was the clincher. It was wide and warm, and when she turned up the wattage it warned off shipping.

One night I b.u.mped into her in Bojangle's and told her, flushed with maybe three pints too many, that she was the kind of beautiful that would finally persuade the UFOs to land. She liked that, said it was the first compliment she'd been paid since she'd arrived in town. One thing led to another, and another led to the other.

She was bubbly and fun, exactly what I was looking for, because I'd been looking for nothing at all. The s.e.x was good, so good it was practically all we did. It wasn't inevitable that she'd wind up pregnant but she did, nearly five months later. All the morning-after pill did was make her sick, although not nearly as sick as the news that it hadn't worked. She told me the night before I was due to go on holiday with the lads. I didn't enjoy the holiday much, but I wouldn't have enjoyed being at home much more. I was gone three months too, which didn't help, but that's a whole different story.

We argued about abortion but kept flipping sides. I was more practical in the morning, when she was going through a nurturing phase. That changed in the evening, when maudlin self-pity kicked in after she'd had a few defiant pints, a guilty cigarette. She told me it was none of my business anyway, it was a woman's right to choose. I asked her if she thought the baby might be a girl, who would grow up to be a woman, with the right to choose. One evening I arrived at her flat to find her sobbing. She eventually gulped it out, she'd once helped a friend get to Liverpool and that no matter what her nightmares were about the soundtrack was always the wailing of babies.

I was more chilled at night. Mellow after a couple of joints, thinking about playing Mozart to her belly, how I'd be able to teach him Pele's body-swerve. In the morning I'd wake up in a cold sweat, unable to breathe, the weight of the day, and the rest of my days, a slab on my chest.

One morning I woke to find her sitting on a chair, holding an unlit cigarette, watching me. She told me she was having the baby, that it would be a boy, and that his name would be Ben. I liked the name.

I asked her to marry me. I thought it was the right thing to do.

"Two wrongs don't make a right, Harry. The only good reason for getting married is that you don't have to go home for Christmas dinner."

It was a difficult pregnancy. The night we finally told her parents, three months down the line, I had my own parentage questioned. Maura cried and Brendan threatened me with physical force before chucking me out of the house. Denise moved into my poky bed-sit, so I couldn't breathe out all the way anymore, and we started making plans, none of them together. Her hormones ran riot and she developed cravings for garlic bread, mint ice cream. Her weight shot up by nearly two stone, not counting the burgeoning Ben. She became addicted to talk shows, toy advertis.e.m.e.nts. I tried to ignore the macabre cabaret in my head, the rhythm section distorted by a feedback screech of panic.

Dutchie offered me a couple of nights working behind the bar. I took them, as much to get out of the flat as for the extra money. Once I had a few quid stashed we moved out to Duncashlin, opposite the big American medical supply complex, a once-plush estate that had been allowed run to seed. The rent was cheap because the back walls were damp but it had two bedrooms. Once we moved in Denise spent all her free time converting one of the bedrooms into a nursery.

I worked back a lot on the job, weekends too, and not only because Denise and I were arguing over the remote control, matt or emulsion, Nescafe or Bewley's. Eventually she started sleeping in the nursery, complaining that I wasn't taking her need for extra s.p.a.ce in bed into consideration. I knew my elbows weren't the problem but I didn't mind. I'd been thinking of sleeping in the nursery myself but I can't stand the smell of new paint.

In total, before and after Ben was born, we went without s.e.x for just over fourteen months. It took Denise a fortnight to tell me s.e.x was the only thing we had in common.

Ben was born on a Tuesday, three days late, seven pounds three ounces. Once the formalities had been observed, Gonzo took me out on the kind of tear that could have toppled an ancient civilisation. We ended up back in Dutchie's, yet another lock-in, which was when the photograph of Gonzo panned out on the pool table was taken. The christening was held two months later, and everything went according to plan bar the G.o.dfather not turning up. There was no excuse and no apology, not even a card for Ben. Radio silence, for nearly four years, and it wasn't his going away that finally killed me, it was that I knew he could never come back.

But he'd come back anyway. I knew why, and I knew I had to stop him, and I knew that I wasn't the only one who couldn't afford for me to die trying.

I looked in on Ben on the way to bed. Found myself, as usual, looking down at a tiny bottom c.o.c.ked in the air. I dredged him up from the depths of the quilt, settled his head on the pillow, sat on the edge of his bed. Watching him breathe, light and shallow.

He was a good kid, but the only way Ben would ever win a Bonny Baby contest was if he set about the other kids with the nearest blunt object. Which, knowing Ben for the tow-headed thug he was, wasn't beyond the realms of possibility. He was a brute of a four-year-old, strong for his age, with a prominent brow and hooded, sleepy eyes, his father's eyes. He had a guileless face and his mother's smile, although his chipped teeth were a mess. Ben never walked anywhere he could run, was still naive enough to believe that the world should open up before him the way he wanted to find it. He was a good kid, affectionate and open, and if he could have done with a sister or a brother to knock some corners off, he wasn't doing too badly in the circ.u.mstances.

A spectre three spectres, knocking corners off me loomed large. I kissed him on the forehead, went to bed, hoping I'd wake up the next morning to find that Gonzo's homecoming was just another nightmare.

Denise was still awake. I sensed it without turning on the light. A hunched lump on the other side of the bed, against the wall, like she was trying to get into the bedroom next door by a process of osmosis. I had no right to be there, but there were only two bedrooms and Ben's bed was a single. I had no intention of sleeping on the couch, either, already starting to stiffen up. Besides, I was paying the mortgage.

I lit a smoke when I was under the covers, waited for the inquisition. She didn't disappoint.

"Who is she?" she asked.

"Who's who?"

"She. Her. The one you were with."

"I told you. I was on my tod."

"All night? Until now?"

She tugged at the quilt, to remind me that she already had about ninety per cent of it tucked under her chin. Breathing through her nose, heavy.

"What's up, Dee?"

She didn't answer, didn't move, until I stubbed the cigarette and lay down. Turning towards her but not so near she might have to move away, because she had nowhere to go.

"We should in Dallas, Harry. You know we should be there. Everyone else is there. I'm sick and tired of not being able to do the things we want to do."

The things she wanted to do, the reason for the last chucking out. The last place on earth I wanted to be was in Dallas, with her parents, to celebrate her sister's fifth wedding anniversary.

"Look, Dee "

"No Harry, you look. Look at yourself. Look at our lives. When was the last time we had a holiday?"

"We went to Wicklow, last year."

"That was two years ago, Harry. And Wicklow isn't a holiday, it's an a.s.sault course. Marian and Jeff went to Barbados last September. Barbados is a holiday."

"Marian and Jeff don't have responsibilities." What they did have was over a quarter of a million dollars in the bank, courtesy of Jeff's software re-writes on Tenga Warriors III: Apocalypse Hence. I knew it was a quarter of a million because Jeff was coy like a kid with a new dirty word. "They can up sticks and go wherever they want, whenever they want. We can't. It's as simple as that."

"You think I don't know that?"

"So what's the problem?"

"That's the f.u.c.king problem."

"I'm the problem." Staying calm. "My job is the problem."

If Denise wanted a fight she was in the wrong building. I'd gone fifteen rounds already, been knocked down in every one. I turned away from her, tried to make myself comfortable. I was nearly asleep when she spoke.

"Harry?"

"What?"

She turned towards me, cuddling close, her voice different, coquettish. Denise knew every game in the book, knew them so well they bored her. Which was why she didn't bother to play by the rules anymore.

"What would you do if I had an affair?"

My guts churned, third time that night. Denise knew all about Gonzo and Celine, it was her last resort. I took a deep breath.

"You have to be married to have an affair, Dee. We're not even seeing each other anymore."

"Okay then. What would you do if I f.u.c.ked someone else?"

"Have you?"

She laughed, delighted at my sullen tone.

"Of course I haven't. Don't be daft."

She kissed my cheek, the touch no more than a breath. I closed my eyes, balled my fists, tried to breathe. I wanted to leave the room, the house, to emigrate whatever it took to slough off the sick emotional seesaw. But I didn't move, knowing that I had nowhere to go that I wouldn't want to kill myself for leaving behind the tow-headed thug in the next room. Seething at the power she possessed, the ability to reduce my entire existence to gut instinct. And if she didn't know it for fact she sensed it, teasing: "It's just a question, Harry."

"Just a question?"

"You know what I mean. A rhetorical question."

"You're not supposed to answer rhetorical questions."

"It was in a questionnaire." She was flirting by now. "It's a questionnaire question."

"Know your problem, Dee?"

"I only have one?"

"Too much Cosmo and not enough Viz. Those magazines are f.u.c.king with your head."

"Maybe. But better that than no f.u.c.king at all."

And she began stroking the inside of my thigh, her palm cool and soft. I closed my eyes. Too weak to stop her, not wanting to anyway, half afraid it was another wind-up and too desperate to believe that it wasn't.

"You still didn't answer my question," she murmured. Brushing my erection, holding off, teasing. I turned until my mouth was at her ear.

"If you f.u.c.ked anyone else, I'd kill him and cripple you."

There was dead silence. Then she eased herself slowly on top of me, sending bolts of pain ricocheting through my body. Somehow it didn't seem to matter.