I said, “Speak for yourself.”

“I am doing. Here’s us wanting to head off to London and take on the music industry, no less. No more factories for us, thanks very much, not our style, we’re gonna be working for rock bands. What would your mammy say to you, if she knew?”

“She’d want to know who the bloody hell do I think I am. Then she’d give me a clatter round the ear, call me a fecking simpleton and tell me to get a hold of myself. It’d be loud.”

“And that,” Rosie said, raising her pint to me, “that’s why we’re up to ninety, Francis. Just about everyone we’ve ever known in our whole lives would say the same thing: they’d say we’re getting above ourselves. If we fall for that shite, we’ll only end up giving out to each other and making each other miserable. So we need to cop on to ourselves, rapid. Yeah?”

Secretly, I still get proud of the ways Rosie and I loved each other. We had no one else to learn from-none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success-so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming. I said, “Come here.” I slid my hands up Rosie’s arms and cupped her cheeks, and she leaned forward and tipped her forehead against mine so that the rest of the world vanished behind the bright heavy tangle of her hair. “You’re dead right. I’m sorry I was a bollix.”

“We might make an arse of this, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t give it our best shot.”

I said, “You’re a smart woman, d’you know that?”

Rosie watched me, close enough that I could see the gold flecks in the green of her eyes, the tiny crinkles at the corners where she was starting to smile. “Nothing but the best for my fella,” she said.

This time I kissed her properly. I could feel the tickets pressed between my wild heartbeat and hers, and I felt like they were fizzing and crackling, ready to explode any second into a ceiling-high shower of gold sparks. That was when the evening fell into place and stopped smelling of danger; that was the moment when that riptide started rising inside me, like a shiver deep in my bones. From that second on, all I could do was go with its pull and believe it would lead us right, draw our feet through the tricky currents and over the wicked drops to all the safe stepping-stones.

When we separated, a little later, Rosie said, “You’re not the only one that’s been busy. I went into Eason’s and looked through all the ads in the English newspapers.”

“Any jobs?”

“Some. Mostly stuff we can’t do, forklift drivers and substitute teachers, but there’s a few for waitresses and bar staff-we can say we’ve got experience, they’ll never check. No one wanting people to do lighting, or roadies, but we knew that; we’ll have to go looking once we get there. And there’s loads of flats, Francis. Hundreds.”

“Can we afford any of them?”

“Yeah, we can. It won’t even matter if we can’t get jobs straight away; what we’ve got saved would be enough for the deposit, and we can manage a shite place just on the dole. It’d be pretty shite, now-just a bedsit, and we might have to share a bath with a few others-but at least we wouldn’t be wasting our money on a hostel any longer than we have to.”

I said, “I’ll share a jacks and a kitchen and everything else, no probs. I just want us out of the hostel as fast as we can. It’s stupid to live in bloody separate dorms, when-”

Rosie was smiling back at me, and the glow in her eyes nearly stopped my heart. She said, “When we could have a place of our own.”

“Yeah,” I said. “A place of our own.”

That was what I wanted: a bed where Rosie and I could sleep through the night in each other’s arms, wake up in the morning wrapped together. I would have given anything, anything at all, just for that. Everything else the world had to offer was gravy. I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafés while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds? I never once bought Rosie flowers-too hard for her to explain at home-and I never once wondered whether her ankles looked exactly the way they were supposed to. I wanted her, all mine, and I believed she wanted me. Till the day Holly was born, nothing in my life has ever been so simple.

Rosie said, “Some of the flats won’t want Irish.”

I said, “Fuck ’em.” That tide was building, getting stronger; I knew that the first flat we walked into would be the perfect one, that this magnet pull would draw us straight to our home. “We’ll tell them we’re from Outer Mongolia. How’s your Mongolian accent?”

She grinned. “Who needs an accent? We’ll speak Irish and say it’s Outer Mongolian. You think they’ll know the difference?”

I did a fancy bow and said, “Póg mo thóin”-kiss my arse: about ninety percent of my Irish. “Ancient Mongolian greeting.”

Rosie said, “Seriously, but. I’m only saying it because I know what you’re like for patience. If we don’t get a flat the first day, it’s not a big deal, right? We’ve got loads of time.”

I said, “I know. Some of them won’t want us because they’ll think we’re drunks or terrorists. And some of them…” I took her hands off her pint and ran my thumbs across her fingers: strong, callused from the sewing, cheap street-stall silver rings shaped like Celtic swirls and cats’ heads. “Some of them won’t want us because we’ll be living in sin.”

Rosie shrugged. “Fuck them too.”

“If you wanted,” I said, “we could pretend. Get goldy-looking rings, call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Just until-”

She shook her head, instantly and hard. “No. No way.”

“It’d only be for a little while, till we’ve the money to do it for real. It’d make our lives a whole lot easier.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not faking that. Either you’re married or you’re not; it’s not about what people think.”

“Rosie,” I said, and tightened my hold on her hands. “You know we’ll do it, don’t you? You know I want to marry you. There’s nothing I want more.”

That got the beginnings of a grin. “You’d better. Back when you and me started going out, I was a good girl, like the nuns taught me, and now here’s me all ready to be your fancy woman-”

“I’m serious. Listen to me. There’s plenty of people who, if they knew, they’d say you were crazy. They’d say the Mackeys are a shower of scumbags, and I’m going to take what I want off you and then leave you high and dry with a baby on your hands and your life flushed down the jacks.”

“Not a chance. It’s England; they’ve got johnnies.”

I said, “I just want to you to know you won’t regret this. Not if I can help it. I swear to God.”

Rosie said gently, “I know that, Francis.”

“I’m not my da.”

“If I thought you were, I wouldn’t be here. Now go up and get us a packet of crisps. I’m starving.”

We stayed in O’Neill’s that night till all the students had gone home and the barman started hoovering our feet. We stretched every pint as long as we could, we talked about safe easy everyday stuff, we made each other laugh. Before we walked home-separately, in case anyone spotted us, me keeping an eye on Rosie from a safe distance behind-we kissed good night for a long time, up against the back wall of Trinity. Then we stood still, wrapped around each other, pressed together from cheeks to toes. The air was so cold that it made a high fine ringing sound somewhere miles above us, like breaking crystal; her breath was hoarse and warm on my throat, her hair smelled like lemon drops and I could feel the fast shake of her heart trembling against my ribs. Then I let go of her and watched her walk away, one last time.