Jean never came back after that night. No one did. Agnes called him ‘a little pervert’ and said he was old enough now to stay at home on his own. But she believed this only up until midnight, at which point she’d come home, bringing whoever she’d gone out to meet back with her. Jim would be sent to bed and they’d stay in the living room. The first time this happened, he heard strange noises and went down to investigate, thinking that maybe the man wasn’t being very nice and Agnes needed his help. To save her now would undo some of the damage from the incident with Jean. But she wasn’t in trouble. From what he could see through the open living-room door, Agnes was enjoying what the man was doing. And after a few minutes hidden in the shadows on the stairs, Jim realised he was enjoying watching it.
He hadn’t thought of Jean in years. She’d be older than him now, wrinkled and loose, fattened and spoiled by having children like they all were. But here, on the doorstep in Meadowbrook, was Alba. She was probably seventeen or eighteen. When she spoke, it was in a thick Spanish accent. She didn’t live at the house, she was staying there as the family’s au pair. She hadn’t seen any white van but maybe the owners had. Both mother and father would be at home later that evening. The hem of her T-shirt, the neckline of which was cut in a deep V, didn’t quite reach the waistband of her jeans, and the skin she’d left exposed was smooth and darkly tanned. He wanted to touch it. He wanted her in the same way he’d wanted Jean.
But he wasn’t fourteen years old any more. She was younger than him, so much younger.
And he was a guard now, standing in front of her in uniform.
She wouldn’t laugh at him. She wouldn’t dare to.
That night, after dinner, Jim told Noreen he had to go back to the station for an hour. He took his uniform with him in a bag and changed into it in a lay-by off the Cork-Dublin road. Then he drove to Meadowbrook. He parked his car in a turnaround at the rear of the estate, got out and started walking to Alba’s house, keeping his hat off until he was right outside it.
But he hadn’t thought it through. Now that her employers were home, there was no need for her to come to the door. The owners were a pleasant, professional couple in their thirties who worked in the city. He asked them about white vans and suspicious characters, but they had seen nothing.
‘We’re hardly ever here,’ the husband said. ‘Unfortunately. And you spoke to Alba already, right?’
Jim said he had. ‘She’s your, ah’ – he pretended to refer to his notebook – ‘au pair?’
The couple nodded enthusiastically and launched into a spiel about how amazing the young girl was, how they’d never cope without her, how they hoped she’d stay with them for longer than the last one had. They told him how old she was (nineteen), where she was from (Girona, Spain) and what days off she had (half of Saturday if they could manage it, and all of Sunday). They told him that since the only spare bedroom was the tiny box room upstairs, they had converted the garage into a little self-contained studio, and that Alba stayed there. Still, they said, it was a small enough space, and she was probably looking forward to the following week, when the couple and their two young children would go to London to visit his family and Alba would have the whole house to herself. Well, they added, not all to herself: her sister was coming from Girona to stay for a few days.
People, Jim mused on the drive home, can be so fucking stupid.
He came back the following week, on three separate occasions, to watch Alba and her sister from the shadows outside the house. On the last one, he entered the house while the women slept, moving through the kitchen, pocketing a couple of delicate things from the laundry basket, standing in the open doorway of the room where Alba slept. He watched her turn over, one bare leg thrown on top of the blankets. She had got up to go to the bathroom and passed right by him as he hid in a recess in the hall and never even knew he was there.
It set him alight, that night. Switched him on, brought him to life. He didn’t care about how bad the days were any more when there could be nights like this. Everything that happened elsewhere – pasty, soft Noreen; the crap he got at the station; the things he saw Aunt Agnes doing when he closed his eyes at night – it all just slid off him, melted away.
This was how everyone else must have learned to live in the world, Jim thought. This is how they managed to move around it calmly, with a smile on their face, taking shit day in, day out. They had found an outlet, a remedy, an antidote. It was the only explanation.
And now he had found his.
But Meadowbrook was spent. The morning after his third and final visit to Alba, he’d come into work to discover a neighbour had reported a prowler the previous night. He’d just missed a car containing two of his colleagues.
He needed to find somewhere else.
And then somewhere else after that.
What Jim needed was a supply.
One night soon after, he told Noreen he was on a surveillance op and drove to a new housing estate fifteen minutes outside the town. He changed into his uniform while parked on the side of the road. He started knocking on doors.
When the occupants opened them, he flashed his badge. He had slipped a new ID card into the clear pocket below it, which had his own picture but a different name. He had photocopied his own ID, modified the details by hand, then photocopied that. It was just a slip of paper with faded ink and wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, but on a doorstep after dark with his fingers partially obscuring it – and when you just saw it for a flash – it did the job fine. ‘Sorry to bother you, but there’s been a burglary in the area, and we’re just canvassing residents to see if they’ve noticed anything strange in the last few weeks or months, seen any suspicious vehicles, that kind of thing …’
One thing immediately became apparent with this approach: all the questions were being directed at him. Because there hadn’t actually been a burglary, this was the first time the residents were hearing of one. They were shocked and concerned and demanding of more details. Jim fluffed the first two homes but, in the third, he found himself face-to-face with the chairman of the local residents’ association. The following day, that man would ring the station asking about the supposed incident. Jim got lucky: he was the one who took the call. But he couldn’t risk a similar thing happening again.
It was easier, he realised, to hide in plain sight. Jim started watching out for small, residential incidents – burglary, theft, vandalism. Sometimes they’d necessitated an actual house-to-house, sometimes not. He’d wait it out a week or more, until he was sure the investigation had tied itself up or petered out, and then he’d drive to the area in the evening with his modified ID and his uniform on the back seat of his car. The burglaries he was ‘warning’ them about had really happened, but his visits had three, unrelated objectives: evaluate the residents, observe the homes, collect information.
For himself.
Jim got braver and braver. He began returning to the houses he liked during the night, sometimes watching from outside, sometimes letting himself in. Occasionally he watched the women sleep, standing just inches from their beds. In one house he stood in the shower with the curtain drawn while the woman who lived there took her make-up off in front of the sink.
But over time, the same old feelings crept back into his days: frustration, rage, shame. If his nocturnal activities were the antidote to the pain of being alive, then life began to develop a resistance. Noreen broke an arm. There was another incident at work. This time he was getting moved into Cork City, to Togher Garda Station, where he’d be confined to desk duty.