Outside the station, he got the respect he deserved. The uniform was a power differential, separating him from the gormless public and criminal lowlifes, the idiots who drove too fast and drank too much and came stumbling out of the pub at closing time to punch other idiots just because they’d looked at them the wrong way. Whenever he walked down the street, thumbs hooked into his vest, the weight of the belt and everything that hung from it pushing down on his hips, he felt good about himself. Taller. Stronger. He could see passers-by clocking him but pretending not to, having second thoughts about crossing before the green man or leaving their car in the disabled spot or littering. Little things, yes, but it was about them noticing him.
Seeing him.
Deferring to him.
Whenever he had to attend a scene, interview witnesses or get someone handcuffed and into the back of the car, it was the same feeling only turned up to the max, practically pumping out a bass-line he couldn’t hear but could feel in his chest. Those moments made him feel like his whole life had just been a series of events to bring him to this place, to this point, to this job. That he was doing what he was supposed to.
Inside the station, it was a different story. He was the lowest member on the totem pole. A joke, even. No one respected him. No one even liked him, although he didn’t give a fuck about that. They tolerated him and, he’d begun to suspect, traded jibes about him behind his back. One of the guys had a buddy in Millstreet who’d told the whole station about Jim losing his shite over the boy in the car accident. A couple of times since other members had come back from scenes wiping away pretend tears, asking for a mug and looking for the super.
All because he was better than them and they knew it. They knew it and they just couldn’t stand it.
Even on that day, the day that started it all, when the call came in about Meadowbrook and Jim and David Twomey were directed to go help with the house-to-house, Jim caught the other man making a face about the pairing. They’d driven to the scene in stony silence, which was probably just as well because David was a terrible driver and Jim didn’t want to make things worse by distracting him.
What had happened was this: the night before, in a sprawling estate of affordable semi-Ds called Meadowbrook, three separate houses had been burgled while their occupants slept. The thieves had taken living-room electronics, cash and whatever jewellery they found on the sleeping female’s side of the bed. The targets were dotted throughout the estate but whoever had done this had moved quickly, hitting one right after the other and getting in and out before anyone even knew they’d been there. Clearly pre-planned. A white van had been spotted in the area at the time and on a number of occasions in recent weeks. Jim and David Twomey were to help knock on every door in the estate to see if any other residents could recall seeing this white van too.
They could’ve done this as a pair – there were enough warm bodies already on the scene – but when they met with the member-in-charge, David piped up with a suggestion: they could split up and cover twice the ground in the same amount of time. This was factually correct, but Jim knew why David had said it: because he wanted shot of him. That was fine with Jim, because he wanted to be shot of that streak of shite as well.
They divided a long row of houses in two, with Jim taking the doors on one side of the street and David the ones on the other. The first four knocks were standard fare. There was the usual over-eagerness to help the Gardaí, so people kept him talking on their doorsteps, or invited him in, and made him wait while they racked their brains over the endless monotony of their days looking for something, anything, they could offer up to the man in the uniform. They wanted him to be pleased with them, to impress. They wanted him to think they were important too. But no one had anything substantial.
And then, at the fifth door, there was Alba.
She’d opened the door in a state of distraction, frazzled, already readying herself to turn back towards the screeching noise that was coming from the space beyond.
Jim saw dark eyes and a huge mess of tightly curled hair.
She saw his uniform and her face changed. She stepped forward, into the light—
And Jim saw Jean standing there.
It wasn’t Jean, of course. It couldn’t be. Truth be told, the two women didn’t even look very much alike. It was more that they felt alike. Somewhere deep inside of him, a door opened. Up until that moment on the doorstep of a house in Meadowbrook, he had thought only Jean possessed the key.
Jean had been his babysitter. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, nearly every other Saturday night, she’d come to look after him while his aunt Agnes went out on the town with whatever toy boy she was into that week. Jean was fun. She would organise elaborate games, bring funny films for them to watch and make him toasted cheese sandwiches with honey inside which, she said, was her trademark secret ingredient. She was a bright light in the darkness and after every visit, Jim counted down the days until she was due to come again.
Somewhere along the line, though, they both got older. She had always seemed so much older than him but as the years passed, it started to seem that, by some alchemy, he might be able to catch her. Over years’ worth of Saturday nights, Jean lost her braces, changed her hair and started to wear things that made her look different. And then she was different, a different shape. And Jim – Jimmy, she always called him – began to notice this, and feel a certain way about it, and think about her when she wasn’t there beyond waiting for her to come back. This made him act differently when she did come around, charging their Saturday nights together with a new, treacherous tension – at least on his part.
Jim ached for her. The only balm for it was to think of her, to bathe himself in thoughts of her, to close his eyes and sink into them. In his imagination, they were together all the time. In his fantasies, he could touch that pale pink flesh, push his hand up to the band of her bra and then under it, while Jean closed her eyes and moaned. The next steps were blurry and vague, the exact process unclear to him, but he could see them in a bed together afterwards, her lying with her head buried against his neck. He dreamed of this sometimes, waking up alone with a cold, sticky dampness berating him for it beneath the sheets.
Then one night that last summer, Jean was making pizza in the kitchen when she stretched to pull her sweatshirt off and lifted her T-shirt too, offering Jim a glimpse of, first, pale skin and the smooth curve of her right side and, then, the edge of the blue band of her bra. There was something about the movement – it was oddly slow, deliberate, performed – that made him think it had been for him. Convinced him it was. She was sending him a message, he thought. Letting him know that whatever he was feeling, she was feeling too.
But it was a lie. A tease. Because when Jim reached for her the way he had seen men reach for women on TV, she recoiled.
Then she got angry.
Then she laughed.
She laughed until she was doubled over and her eyes had filled with tears. She laughed until the smell of burnt bread filled the kitchen and she had to go and open the oven, which billowed smoke. She laughed until every cell in Jim’s body was a burning white fireball of hot, sticky shame. She was still laughing when Jim turned and ran, upstairs and into his bedroom, and banged on the walls with his fists until his hands were numb and his knuckles were split and there were smears of red on the wallpaper.