Conor
I’d gone for fucking aspirin. I’d wanted something stronger than aspirin, a shot of whiskey, to be more precise. But if I allowed myself something stronger every time the weather threatened rain in goddamn Dublin, I’d be there on the sidewalk outside the unmarked curtained rehab centre along with all the other shivering, muttering, shaking addicts.
Slate-grey clouds had slid in early that afternoon to swallow the shifty white haze. I hadn’t needed to even glance up from my sketchbook (another dead flower as it turned out, another one not quite right as it always was) to know it was threatening rain: the familiar dull ache in my leg had warned me as it always did.
It hadn’t been a surprise to find the pharmacy bottle in the kitchen at the back of the shop empty. I’d left Dublin Ink to get my painkillers before it grew worse (it always grew worse) with Rian lying upside down on the couch, his fingers drumming his temples, and Mason flipping through tattoo options with a busty blonde, his chin on her shoulder, his eyes down her ample tits.
I’d returned with four capsules on my tongue and a grey blur at the edges of my vision to find no one there at all. Except a little figure, that damned juvie, robbing the cash register.
When my hand gripped a narrow bone, a stretch of pale skin, I’d barely even registered in my mind that it was a girl. All I could think was my leg fucking hurt and Diarmuid was fucking dead. I knew it was a terrible idea to welcome in with outstretched arms a little fiend who wouldn’t think twice about stabbing someone—anyone—in the back. I knew this would happen eventually, though I’d didn’t expect it to be within thirty seconds of the little brat arriving on our front steps. Juvie teens were juvie teens for a fucking reason: they were no good, they couldn’t be good. The best they could be was restrained, their worst attributes dulled and mitigated, a rabid dog on a good, solid chain.
“Mason!” I shouted as the little thief thrashed in my iron grip. “Mason! Rian!”
When I’d caught the brat by surprise, cash had gone spilling everywhere. It was under my feet as the tiny thing tried to backpedal, to squirm away. It wadded up beneath my boots, got smeared with mud. I yanked the little thief back toward me and bellowed into the parlour, “Rian! Mason!”
“Let me go,” the little thing growled at me, indignant for a thief.
Of course, what was I to expect. Those kids thought the world was theirs for taking. Who gave a damn who it belonged to or how hard they’d worked for it?
“Let me go,” the thief shouted again as a tiny fist came to land with the violence of a canary on my chest. “Let me go, let me go!”
My cell phone was in my hand, my thumb dialling the numbers as I strengthened my grip on the thief’s wrist. It felt as if my fingers had to wrap around it not twice, but three times. The waif kept trying to yank her wrist away, kept thrashing, kept kicking, kept shouting at me as the phone rang and rang.
In quick succession, I shouted once more for Mason and Rian without response, I received Diarmuid’s irritatingly chipper voicemail informing me to leave a message or call the police for an emergency, and the little thief placed a well-aimed swingof her military boot right to the jagged scar above my left knee. If I was seeing grey before, it was red that now flooded my vision. It took all the self-control I’d built like a house of cards over the long, painful years to not snap the wrist in my hand right then and there. I squeezed my eyes shut and exhaled through my nose.
The thief stilled slightly, sensing either a reprieve or a chink in my armour, but her efforts renewed doubly when I opened my eyes, trained them fixedly on the front door, and began to drag her along beside me.
“What are you doing?” she shouted, clawing ineffectually at the leather of my jacket, a gift from Brian. I would have been upset about the long scratch marks if it hadn’t already been to hell and back with the scorch marks and tears and frayed edges to prove it. “Let me fucking go!”
The little bell above the door nearly snapped off as I kicked the door open and shoved the girl ahead of me. It was my bruising grip on her wrist alone that kept her from falling onto the sidewalk which was now dotted with large black drops of rain, a promise of more to come. A few people hurried on their way past us, some with hoods drawn tight, others with bent and broken umbrellas, most with nothing at all atop their glistening, feverish foreheads. I ignored them, because they ignored me: it was the code of the neighbourhood. Keep your head down. Don’t hear anything. Don’t see anything.
My motorcycle was parked on the street just outside the shop and yet even that short distance made my leg warm with prickled tongues of fire; it was going to be a bad one, I knew. I bit back a groan as I slung my leg over the seat of the motorcycle. The thief looked like a skittish black colt as I drew her, resisting each step tooth and nail, toward me. She was all thrashing hair and long, skinny legs. If I’d bothered to look at her face, I was certain I’d see little more than the whites of her frightened eyes.
“Let me go!” she shouted. “What are you doing? Let me go!”
I didn’t care that she was scared. She could cry on Diarmuid’s shoulder; he could offer her tear-stained cheeks a tissue. I was taking her to his office and I was telling him exactly where he could shove his government money. And then I was leaving: back to the peace of the tattoo shop, back to the bottle of whiskey in the bottom drawer of my desk, back to the tattoo chair where if I stretched out completely and stayed perfectly still the pain was not bad enough to make me pass out.
As I started the ignition on the motorcycle, I was at least able to admire if not the strength of the thief’s body, at least the strength of her stupidity. It was obvious, and I was sure, obvious to her as well that there was no way she was escaping. I easily had a foot on her and I wouldn’t be much surprised to find that I was double her weight. Where my muscles from the boxing gym filled my leather jacket, hers might as well have been flung over the low-hanging branch of a bleached white aspen in the dead of winter. It was in all ways an unfair fight, and yet someone hadn’t told her or she didn’t care, because she just continued to fight harder and, as I was quickly to take notice of, shout louder.
In the time it had taken to mount my motorcycle, to fight back the wave of nausea from the pain in my leg, and to reaffix my grip on the little thief after starting the bike, a small crowd had gathered around us, in the pothole-littered street and even on the opposite sidewalk. Crowds only gathered in this part of town for two reasons: a serious crime had just been committed that didn’t involve them or a serious crime was just about to be committed that didn’t involve them. With raindrops beginning to fall and dark eyes fixed all around me, I suddenly saw the situation more clearly.
I was a giant of a man, thirty-one going on fifty, tattooed and muscled from head to toe, who was forcing a young girl, nothing more than whisper of a thing, obviously against her will, to get on his motorcycle. I stared around me at the shocked eyes of people who from years of violence and cruelty had long ago lost the ability to be shocked. I looked at my grip on the one handle of the motorcycle, at my knuckles white between my black tattoos. I followed my shaking arm, muscles twitching with strain, all the way to the pale wrist that trembled even as it fought to escape me. It was only then that I paused to finally take in the sight of the little thief.
A pain worse than anything my leg had ever punished me with stabbed at my heart at the sight of the girl, at the sight of the child. From my conversation with Diarmuid, I knew to expect someone young, but I never could have imagined she should be so young. In my mind, in the blindness of my rage, I had thought I was holding onto a hardened face, a set jaw, a pair of eyes etched with a compromised self, old age come early as it does for those who have to fight for life.
But the little thief had innocence in her eyes even as she narrowed them at me in anger, in a pathetic attempt at intimidation. Her eyelashes tangled with the dark hair that fluttered in the wind, tangled like sheets of a napping child, sweetly and messily and warmly. She was shouting at me—obscenities, I was sure, by that time—but all I could see was the plumpness of her cheeks, strawberries at the end of the season, red to the point of positively bursting. Contrary to everything I had imagined, the girl, the little girl, was full of youth, full of life.
I released her with a suddenness as if I had been burned. She, too, reeled, surprised at her abrupt freedom. Her bright eyes widened, but only for a moment. She was smart, I saw. You didn’t survive a tough upbringing without learning never to question a scrap of bread; you just take it and run.
After that brief hesitation, that startled inquiry where her eyes met mine and neither she nor I blinked, the girl darted away like a rabbit released from a snare. Her boots smacked the concrete as the raindrops splattered around her. She weaved through the small crowd who followed her escape with turned heads as they dropped their cell phones back into their deep rain jacket pockets.
I sagged against the handlebars of my motorcycle with a weariness that went straight to the bone, burrowed in deep within the marrow. A cold came over me, the kind of cold that hours before a stone-blackening fire cannot vanquish. I squeezed my trembling fingers against my throbbing leg and let my head fall to my chest for an exhale that rattled like I was dying of pneumonia.
It was just by chance that I glanced back up, looking through the strands of hair the cruel wind had tugged loose from my bun. At that very moment, the girl, the little thief, in a run as if for her life looked back over her shoulder at me.
It was only for the blink of an eye that we connected before her hair fell back over her face like the wing of a raven. She turned her head and disappeared around the trash-littered corner.
But the look stayed with me like the distortions in your vision when you stare too closely at the sun.
I tried to blink her away, to squeeze my eyes shut and make her go away. But there she was, present before me. Accusatory. Alluring. All-consuming.
The rain was turning my leather jacket from brown to black, save the white claw marks she’d left on my arm, and my leg was burning anew, but I did not turn off the ignition. I revved the ignition, said fuck it to the tattoo parlour and drove headlong into the pain.