Thicker Than Water

How in the name of all that’s fucked up and untenable had she ended up with Kenny? What tortuous byways of destiny and dumb lucklessness had led her to live with a guy she already knew was a coward, a bully and an emotionally unavailable gobshite?

Nicky had filled in some of the gaps, of course, but it hurt a little to think about that: about the long succession of other men she’d lived with, only to move on once the magic wore off or the hard-core abuse set in. Why had she made so little of her life? Become a casual adjunct to a bunch of losers, one of whom had even given her a kid without that making the slightest difference to his level of commitment? She’d seemed like the best of us, in a lot of ways.

The most alive, anyway.

But where was she now?

And assuming I even found her, could she give me any clue as to why Kenny hated Matt enough to put him in the frame for murder?

I fell asleep still chewing on these unpalatable little nuggets, £itt/diand as a result I slept very shallowly, coming awake from disconnected dreams and then dozing off again in a cycle that made me feel more tired when I woke the next morning than I had been when I went to bed.

But as sometimes happens when you’ve been through a night like that, your mind like a computer that’s hung in the act of shutting down, you wake up with fragments of the recent past stuck in the forefront of your consciousness. For me, the fragments included Matt’s first sermon at Our Lady of Zion. The text was from Numbers 23: ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my end be like his.

’ A pretty downbeat choice for your first Mass at your first ministry, I thought at the time. But I never asked him why, and I realised now what a shitty thing it was I’d done to him. Yeah, I came along to wave the flag and mark the occasion. But Matty was hurting: he’d told me so as clearly as he knew how. And I’d walked away without saying a word.

Later for that. Business is business."

"The Liver Building is the iconic face of Liverpool: pure white stone, golden at sunset like an emperor’s palace floating on the muddy Mersey, and guarded by those two mythical cormorants with their well-chronicled fondness for honest men and virtuous women.

The Cunard is the big ugly bread box right alongside: as squat as a stool and as elegant as the stump of a limb. I worked there myself in the summer before I went off to college, as an office assistant for the Regis Shipping and Forwarding Company.