Page 98 of Calling Frank O'Hare

Relieved but triumphant, Frank let him go and they scrambled back up onto the sofa.

Martin clutched his side. ‘Have you any more of that whisky?’

Frank wiped the sweat from his brow and poured two out. ‘I saw you that summer. I saw the way she kept touching you, the way she looked at you.’

‘She was winding you up. Trying to throw you off the scent.’

‘And I saw you talking in the garden, the day before you left. She was angry. It was because you were going back, wasn’t it? She didn’t want you to leave.’

Martin took a swig of his drink. ‘Are you not listening to me? She was doing all that stuff for your benefit. She wanted to hurt you. She was cruel like that. But it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Finn either. It was Billy. She’d been seeing him on and off for ages. That day you saw us talking, I was threatening to tell you if she didn’t stop. She was upset, but not because she wanted me. She didn’t want to stop seeing Billy.’

No, that was wrong. They’d stopped seeing Billy after he came for Frank with a baseball bat. And she didn’t even like Billy in that way. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘No surprise there. You haven’t believed a word I’ve said since we were kids.’

‘Because you’ve always been a lying, sneaky fecker.’

Martin laughed and shook his head. ‘That’s Billy talking now.’

‘Leave him out of this. He was a good friend to me, until I fucked everything up with Eve.’

Martin threw his hands up in the air. ‘Will you catch yourself on? Billy was never a good friend to you. He was the worst kind of friend. God knows we all loved him, but he only ever thought of himself. All that bullshit about you stealing his missus when he’d been stealing from you for years.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Him and Ellen started sleeping together not long after he hooked up with you in London. But he was doing the dirty on you well before that. He was seeing Eve when you were still with her. She was never gonna follow you to Birmingham. Billy already had his claws in her by then.’

It was all lies. It had to be. Billy wasn’t like that. Frank was the one who’d betrayed him, not the other way round. That was the truth of it. Except. Except he’d never got a believable answer from Billy or Eve on what they’d been doing that day the Balaclavas took Billy away. But this was Martin telling him, and Martin was a dab hand at twisting the truth to suit him. ‘If it’s true, how come you knew about it and not me?’

‘Siobhan told me. Not sure how she knew. Maybe Da told her. Me and Finn kept an eye on them after that. They weren’t that good at hiding it. It was almost as if they wanted to be found out. Well, Billy anyway.’

‘And Ellen. How did you know about her?’

‘Billy, of course. The big-headed twat was bragging about how he had the sweetest revenge on you for shagging his wife. He couldn’t see the irony. Like we said before, no imagination. It was always all about him. I know you’re not even thinking this right now but just in case you’re lying in bed some night in the future killing yourself over it, Robyn is definitely yours. They’d stopped seeing each other when her old man got sick, and didn’t get back together until after Robyn was born. In New York, I think he said it was. Anyways, she has our birthmark, doesn’t she? And she absolutely did not get that from me.’

Of course Robyn was his. Frank had no doubt in his mind whatsoever about that. He knew it the first time he held her, and he’d never for one minute considered that she wasn’t his daughter. Not even in their darkest times when Ellen had implied that she wasn’t.

Martin was back on his feet again. ‘That’s why we stopped seeing Billy, me and Finn. We’d had enough of him. Look, I’m gonna hit the sack. You need some space to get your head round all of this. Do you still keep the bedding in the same cupboard?’

Frank nodded. His head was spinning and bed linen was not something he could even contemplate right now. Martin put his hand on Frank’s shoulder. ‘We can talk more in the morning. Sorry it’s all come out this way.’

‘Uh huh. Martin. That day the Balaclavas came for Billy.’

‘I knew he was meeting Eve there. I had this plan of taking you that way so’s you’d see them together. I knew you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

‘I might have.’

‘Nah. Billy had already turned you against me. That thing we had, you and me, Billy broke it. He ruined us all in different ways. We just didn’t know it then.’

‘Did you know about the Balaclavas, or why they came for him?’

‘No. It was as much a shock to me as you. You fight like a girl, by the way.’

‘Go fuck yourself, Martin.’

‘You too, brother. Goodnight.’

It was after three. The whisky bottle was empty. At one point Frank had switched off the light with the intention of going up but he’d ended up back on the sofa. As he recalled, it was one of the last things Ellen had bought for this house, just before the summer of 2007. He really needed to change it. There were a lot of things he needed to change.

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