When You Wake up and Scream

Conán spotted Naoise in Starbucks, and he was surprised, thinking that she would be in University today. She looked quite depressed, and hung back out of view and watched her for a while, wondering if he should go in or if she wanted to be by herself. She looked incredibly forlorn, sitting with her cup in both hands, resting her chin on the rim of the cup and gazing into space. Conán decided to go in and see if she was all right. She didn't notice he were there until he sat down next to her. He didn't say a word; he just put his arm around her. She leant against him and sighed.

"It's nine o'clock on a Thursday morning." she said softly. "You know what I would usually be doing at nine o'clock on a Thursday morning?"

"Not really, no." Conán answered. "I would have said you should be in Uni, but obviously not."

"No," Naoise sighed again. "Nine o'clock on a Thursday morning would usually have been the only proper time Mary and I would have been able to catch up with one another. It was usually the only time we were both free for any amount of time. So, we'd always come down here to Starbucks, and this very table would always be free, this here one in the corner with the comfy chairs, and we'd sit here for hours gossiping. Now I have to come in by myself. I miss her, Conán. I really miss her."

Naoise's voice broke on the last sentence and her eyes filled up with tears. She turned her face against Conán so nobody else would see. Conán gently stroked her hair, not really knowing what to say.

"You're a strong girl, Naoise. You can get through this, I know you can," he eventually said softly.

"It's just not the same, though, is it? And it never will be! What did Mary ever do to anyone? I mean, I know she could be a little bit of a madam sometimes but who can't? I know I have my stroppy days, but no one deserves to be strangled like a dog in the street!"

"I know," Conán murmured.

"I don’t know what I'm going to do, Conán," Naoise whispered. "I'm fine at home, you know, I get on as normal though Mummy knows I'm not myself, and I mess around with Damian and I do my Uni work and all that, but as soon as I'm by myself, I start feeling so depressed. I can't stop thinking about her. I can't even bear to sit in the same seat in my lectures, for crying out loud, because I look beside me and Mary's not there. I just keep expecting her to walk in through the door of the lecture room muttering about her hangover being why she was late."

Conán squeezed her softly.

"She's not going to come back, Naoise. You can't keep thinking that she will."

"I know that." Naoise whispered, her voice catching at the end of the sentence. "But I just like to think that she will."

Conán wasn't enjoying the conversation. He had no regrets about killing Mary anymore, but seeing Naoise so upset wasn't enjoyable. He cared about Naoise, indeed she was the only person in his life who he had cared about, and he didn't like being the cause of her upset, seems he was only just learning to care and didn't want to put himself off with a bad experience. He didn't think that caring about someone would make him feel so lousy.

"Come on. Are you done with your coffee?" Conán asked suddenly.

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, I'm not letting you sit here and mope. Come on, we'll go out, and I'll try and cheer you up."

Naoise gave a watery smile.

"I don't know, you might be biting off more than you can chew."

"Ah, I'll be sweet. If I need to, I'll just get drunk and fall over, that'll make you laugh, eh?"

"I suppose so." Naoise managed a small giggle. Conán pulled her up and they went out of the side door, turned left, and headed back towards the main streets.

"I don't know where we'll head now, mind you." Conán said as an afterthought. "I guess we'll just walk."

"That's good enough for me. I don’t want to sit and think about all these things."

"Well, what do you want to think about?"

"I don't know. Anything but … anything but what happened. It's not so much the death that's bothering me. It's the way she died, that's what's upsetting me so much. She always had a fear of not being able to breathe."

"She might not have been aware of it." Conán said carefully.

"I hope not." Naoise said softly. She paused before she spoke again. "Conán, what do you think happens when you die?"

"Well, having been close to it several times, I can tell you that it's pretty uneventful, if my experience is anything to go by."

"You've been close to death?" Naoise's eyes widened.

"A few times, yeah. Like when I had the flu that time and I couldn't even get up to eat and I started to die because of that … that was pretty boring, to tell you the truth. I just kept falling asleep and thinking I wouldn't wake up, but the only time I thought I wasn't going to wake up, I did … in the hospital, though."

"What about the other times?"

"Well, I was drunk and my mother was angry at me because I'd started on her spirits, and so she grabbed he empty bottle and smashed it down over my head and that did a fair bit of harm. I fell on the floor pretty hard and then she kicked me right where the bottle had got me and there was a pretty bad crunch from that, and I thought that I was off for my tea then. Again, it was pretty uneventful. Everything just went hazy and then it went dark and then there was this funny feeling where I was almost drifting away from myself, and that's as far as I got. Then there was this jolt and I woke up, again in the hospital. She must have been scared if she took me to the hospital. It wasn't painful, though. You know when you have dreams and you fall and then you jolt and wake up?" Conán glanced at Naoise and she nodded. "Well, it was like that. I don't know what it would be like to properly die, though. I would imagine just like that, but without the jolt."

"I hope it was peaceful."

"Well, if she was strangled she would have been unconscious before she died, anyway, so she wouldn't have known anything about it. She would have just been unaware of everything until she was knocking at the pearly gates."

"Do you believe in all that? Heaven and Hell and all?"

Conán paused.

"I don't know." he eventually said. "There's probably something there, I don't believe that you just float in nothingness for the rest of eternity. See, I'm not sure if there's a God, that's all."

Naoise's eyes widened.

"How can you not believe there's a God?" she gasped. "Conán, there has to be something there, of course there's a God!"

"Well, I'm the sort of person who needs proof," Conán's voice had an edge of bitterness to it. "And God's done nothing for me."

Naoise shook her head in an almost disapproving way, but Conán let it go over his head.

"God's not at your beck and call, Conán."

"I know that."

"He presents you with opportunities, everything happens for a reason. Did you not listen in RE? He has a plan for you, and everything happens to work towards that plan."

"There must be some weird-ass plan going on with me, then." Conán snorted.

"Oh, is that it? Because God didn't send a bolt of lightning down and strike your mother dead, you don't believe He exists?"

"That's not it at all." Conán said patiently. "God did get rid of my mother. It wasn't exactly a bolt of lightning, but it was a bolt of heroin, which did the job just as well. No, I just remember whenever I was little, I used to pray to Him every night to make me into a better child, a child my mother could love, a child who would make my mother happy, but she was never happy with me. This was at a very young age, when my mother would still screech at me twice daily that I was a filthy sinner who would die and go to Hell. So, because I was so young, I just thought that God had a grudge against me and He was ignoring me. I grew up pretty disillusioned, and I haven't prayed since."

"Perhaps you should now you're older?" Naoise asked quietly. "Considering all that you've been through, you haven't got a bad lot. You've got a place to live, you've got enough money to scrape by with, and all you really need to work on is your alcohol problem."

"What alcohol problem?" Conán demanded shortly.

"Point made." Naoise muttered wryly. "I hate to break it to you, Conán, but you're an alcoholic if I ever saw one."

Conán glared.

"I didn't ask your opinion on the matter, Naoise."

"So you think it's healthy that in the little time I've known you, I've had to drag you home once, after bailing you out of trouble with the Garda, and I've found you half dead in the street and had to ring an ambulance so you could have your stomach pumped and be put on a drip?"

"You caught me at a bad stage." Conán suddenly sighed. "Look, I know I drink a little more than I should, all right? But I enjoy it, and it's not ruining my life in my eyes, so I'm not going to give up. I'll give up when I feel like it, all right? And when I want to. But, until then, I'm doing fine by myself."

"I just don't want you doing anything stupid."

"I won't." Conán assured her, but his mind was on the murders. Suddenly, he realised where he was, and changed the subject abruptly. "Look. That's my old house."

Naoise looked up at it, and then looked at Conán and raised her eyebrows.

"It looks like a dump."

Conán laughed.

"Yeah, would you believe it looked like that whenever I used to live there? See that front room there? That was my bedroom."

"It looks like the bathroom."

"Exactly."

Naoise gave a thin smile, and Conán flicked a finger under chin.

"What?" she asked.

"Don't be in a mood with me, Naoise," he said to her softly.

"I'm not in a mood, I'm just worried, I keep telling you that. You're a nice guy, Conán, and I don’t want you wrecking any chances you might have, even if they're small ones."

"I know what I'm doing, Naoise. I've been drinking spirits since I was about nine or ten, and you weren't worried about me then."

"No, but now I'm even more worried about you. Your liver will be a mutant by now."

"Ah, it won't. It'll just look like a bottle of Power's."

Naoise laughed properly this time.

"All right, whatever you say, Alco Man."

"We prefer to be called the sober-impaired."

"You just made that up."

"I know."

They walked away up the street, and as they turned the corner at the top, Conán took her hand, intertwining their fingers and squeezing her hand softly. Naoise squeezed his hand back, and they carried on walking without another word.