Free Resonance by Celine Kiernan

nice lodging. With a nice landlady.’
    ‘Pissing away me money on rent and frivolities, with nowhere to stash me savings without some busybody snuffling around when I’m in work. What the lads don’t know has never hurt me, Tina. They’d never a bloody clue there was anything more than fleas and mouse shit under me blankets. Until today, that is.’ There was a moment of silence between them. Then he said, without much hope, ‘Maybe the kids won’t say anything?’
    ‘They ran off up the street screaming for Mickey.’
    Joe grimaced at her, but he wasn’t angry. Not really. He was just tired suddenly, bone-tired and weary to his soul. He’d been careful such a long time. Mickey had never considered him much worth pissing on – but now? Tina had just shoved him straight into the spotlight, stark and vulnerable, with a fistful of money in each hand. He sighed. ‘What am I going to do?’
    ‘Eighty pounds is a lot of money to have saved,’ said Harry. ‘Three jobs or not.’ He was still staring at Joe with that fixed intensity, demanding an explanation.
    Joe was tempted to cut him dead with a sneer. To hell with Harry if he thought Joe was a thief. But Tina was squinting sideways at him now, doing the figures in her head, and Joe knew she deserved more than a gutter-boy’s guff and bluster.
    ‘Me da saved most of it,’ he said. ‘He spent his whole life saving, it seems. After he died, and me ma moved us in with them , she taught me how to hide the money from them and how to keep secretly adding to the purse. And after she was dead … I just kept doing it.’
    ‘But why, Joe?’ asked Tina. ‘ Why? ’
    Joe saw it in her face, the horror at all the things his mam had endured, all the hardships she’d made him endure in that squalid room in the care of those brutes, when the two of them could at least have had their own place. He shook his head.
    ‘I don’t know what Ma and Da were saving for. Sometimes I wonder if they even knew. Maybe they’d have just kept on saving until they died of old age. Year after year, shoving money into that purse under the floorboards. It getting fatter and them getting thinner. I wonder if they’d have died having never done anything at all …’
    ‘They did ,’ said Tina. ‘They died with all that money, and never did anything. And now you—’
    ‘No, not me ,’ cried Joe. ‘I know what I’m doing with it. For a long time I didn’t. I just kept squirrelling it away week after week like me ma had shown me, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing it for – but I know now, Tina.’ He gently squeezed her hand. ‘I’ve known for ages what all them years of shite were for.’
    ‘A future,’ breathed Harry, his face illuminated with fervent understanding.
    Joe nodded. ‘Not just tuppence-worth of comfort that’s pissed away in an hour. A proper future; one worth sacrificing for. I have a plan.’
    Harry leapt to his feet. ‘So do I!’ he cried. ‘And it’s notto be a darned carpenter. What the heck was I thinking? I hope I’m not too late.’
    ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘To get my place in those auditions. I won’t get to be a magician sitting on my ass dreaming about it!’ He dived for the door.
    ‘Break a leg!’ called Tina.
    Harry paused, then ran back. He grabbed Joe’s hand and shook it. ‘Don’t go back to that cesspool, Joe. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there are plenty of places to sleep in this theatre until you get yourself sorted.’
    ‘I can’t do that!’
    ‘Why, of course you can. Free rent? No bedbugs? Come on, Gosling.’ He winked. ‘You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to get past a locked door.’
    Joe had to smile, so earnest were those fierce blue eyes and that handshake. He lost the smile pretty damned quick when Harry leaned across the table and kissed Tina on her mouth.
    ‘Just for luck!’ he cried, already running out the door.
    Tina put her fingers to her lips, her cheeks