The Trespasser

by Tana French

“Pint? The early houses’ll be opening.” “You must be joking.” “To celebrate.” Steve, God help me, also does positivity better than I do. I give him a stare that should nip that in the bud. “Celebrate what?” He grins. Steve is thirty-three, a year older than me, but he looks younger: maybe the schoolboy build, all gangly legs and skinny shoulders; maybe the orange hair that sticks up in the wrong places; or maybe the relentless godawful cheerfulness. “We got them, did you not notice?” “Your granny could’ve got those two.” “Probably. And she’d’ve gone for a pint after.” “She was an alco, yeah?” “Total lush. I’m just trying to live up to her standards.” He heads for the printer and starts sorting pages. “Come on.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” from Gary. “Smart-arsed little bollix wants to know if my prostate’s giving me hassle,” he tells me. “Young people nowadays; no respect.” “Awww, Gar. It’s OK. I respect you.” “At least you don’t mock my prostate. Never mock a man’s prostate. That’s dirty.” “Below the belt, yeah?” “Holy Jaysus. Is that what passes for humor over there?”

If someone rescues you, they own you. Not because you owe them—you can sort that, with enough good favors or bottles of booze dressed up in ribbons. They own you because you’re not the lead in your story any more. You’re the poor struggling loser/helpless damsel/plucky sidekick who was saved from danger/dishonor/humiliation by the brilliant brave compassionate hero/heroine, and they get to decide which, because you’re not the one running this story, not any more.

I kind of want to say sorry, but explaining what I’m apologizing for and not apologizing for would take too much hassle and embarrassment and overall shite. Steve might be thinking the same thing, I don’t know. Instead I get the whiskey bottle and give us both a refill. We sit there, drinking, while the stuff we should probably be saying out loud gets itself done in the silence.

“Fuck me,” I say, suddenly realizing. “I’m half English.” “And you’re middle-class,” Steve says. “Next time you go home, you’re going to get the shite kicked out of you.” “Shh. Nobody has to know.”

“Lovely shop,” Steve says, looking around. “This is where you and Aislinn met, yeah?” “Yeah. Right over there, in the children’s section. She told me she loved bookshops. Magic, she said, specially small ones like this; you always felt like you might find the one book you’d been looking for all your life, at the back of some shelf .

You can knock down a genuine belief, if you load up with enough facts that contradict it; but a belief that’s built on nothing except who the person wants to be, nothing can crumble that.