A Man With One of Those Faces (Dublin Trilogy publication order, #1; Dublin Trilogy chronological order, #6)

by Caimh McDonnell

Are babies really warm? Do you start life as a tiny boiling inferno of energy, and you just get colder and colder until you eventually reach corpse temperature? He was only speculating on the baby thing. Despite being twenty-eight years of age, Paul had never held one.

She was not a bad looking woman, truth be told; a couple of years older than himself, short brown bobbed hair, decent figure – she wouldn’t be launching a thousand ships any time soon but she’d undoubtedly create a fair bit of interest in a chip shop queue.

“Can I ask a question?” she said, and he felt himself sag. He knew what was coming. “Why do people say that?” he said. “A – you just have, and B – nobody has ever accepted no as an answer.”

If you want the honest-to-God truth, most people have a lot they want to say and not that much they want to hear.

The only attempt at decoration was a picture of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall facing the door – her lips pursed, head tilted – like she was listening with the most sincere concern. Jesus may’ve died for your sins, but his ma was the one who was willing to listen to your excuses.

Marriage, thought Stewart, was all about compromise. Compromise and lying. The right kind of lying.

In the meantime, he was dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s, waiting for the S and the H to show up.

“He’s a big fan of those Scandinavian crime dramas,” said Stewart. “They are excellent,” added Wilson. “Yeah,” said Brigit, “as long as you don’t mind people staring wistfully at fjords for an hour when they’re supposed to be solving a crime.”

Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

Whilst Phil was a criminal, he’d never been accused of being a particularly good one. Still, God loved a trier, as did the criminal justice system. Phil had done wonders for conviction statistics.

I’m the one who had to actually make the money. The man had brains to burn, he could have made ten times more in a suit than he ever did with a gun, but most men are just boys who’re allowed to buy booze.