Tommy McGeown’s notebook

Tommy McGeown’s notebook is a small black notebook that Tommy kept in his back pocket. Its entries record his encounters with Cushla Lavery and reveal an intensity she had noticed only faintly, if at all. When the notebook is brought out during questioning, private writing becomes evidence: its account of their exchanges unsettles Cushla’s assumptions about Tommy and sharpens the questions surrounding her relationship with Michael Agnew.

The Notebook as a Physical Record

The notebook appears when the questioner opens a folder and takes out the small black book Tommy carried in his back pocket. He holds it up and asks Cushla whether she gave Tommy her number. She says she did, so he could call if the family needed shopping done. The object’s modest, everyday form contrasts with the weight given to its contents: what Tommy privately wrote has been preserved and can now be read back to someone who did not know he was recording those moments.

The questioner turns the pages while speaking to Cushla, pausing at entries he considers relevant. His handling of the notebook makes it more than a container for recollection. It becomes a selected record, brought forward to test her answers and to set her account beside Tommy’s own words. The pages retain his perspective, but their presence in the questioning also gives that perspective a new audience and purpose.

What Tommy Recorded

One entry describes a conversation with Cushla about books, and notes that Tommy could not stop looking at her. He records that she caught him looking and smiled, while Mandy’s calling him a kid interrupted the moment. The entry gives shape to an attraction that Cushla had suspected but treated as unimportant. Her response to hearing it is dismissive: she says the attention means nothing. Tommy’s account, however, preserves how closely he watched her and how much significance he gave to a brief exchange.

A separate entry concerns an Easter Sunday phone call. Tommy writes down that Cushla called him Michael and wonders who that Michael is. The notebook thus records not only Tommy’s feelings but also a moment of mistaken identity that bears on the questions about Cushla’s relationship with Michael Agnew. Cushla explains that Michael sometimes phoned her in the evenings and that she presumed it was him; she had never given Tommy Michael’s surname. The juxtaposition leaves the notebook as a partial record of what Tommy heard, rather than a complete account of what the call meant.

After an encounter at the doorstep, Tommy writes that Cushla sees him as a teenager, while there are things she does not know about him. The entry marks the distance between how Cushla understood him and how he understood himself. When the questioner reads it, Cushla wonders what Tommy meant. Her uncertainty is important: the notebook offers his words, but it does not explain them for her or resolve what he chose to keep private.

Evidence, Perspective, and Significance

Cushla’s answers and Tommy’s entries preserve different kinds of knowledge. She remembers giving him her number for practical help with shopping and regards his interest as something that means little; the notebook records the emotional charge he attached to looking at her, speaking with her, and being mistaken for someone else. Neither perspective supplies a complete account of the other. The object makes their difference visible without turning Tommy’s private interpretations into settled facts about Cushla’s intentions.

The scene also shifts the notebook from an intimate possession into an instrument of questioning. The examiner selects passages about Cushla and Michael, and the sequence of questions connects Tommy’s private observations to an inquiry into Cushla’s relationship. That transition gives the book its narrative force: an ordinary pocket object carries memories that were not shared at the time, and once opened, it changes what Cushla must confront about the encounters she thought she understood.