A woman at the top of Gillerton Road, a Brownie Guide leader, has started meeting the man who runs the newsagent’s after he closes his shop. The girl next door, a talented student expected to excel in her A levels, has stopped attending school and is spending her days in Hyde Park, circling round and round the algae-riddled lake on a pedalo, lighting match after match, letting each one burn down to a blackened wisp. A man who lives opposite has bought himself an Italian scooter. He likes the way he can weave its sleek body in and out of the cars, the way it sings as it accelerates past lumbering buses. He likes the way the hot air and exhaust fumes swoosh over his skin, through his hair. He likes the puttering growl of the engine and the dazzling gleam of the sun off the chrome. And, as most people on the street now know, Mr Riordan at number fourteen has disappeared, just upped and left, and his family have no idea where he’s gone or when he’s coming back. If he’s coming back.
A fox skitters out from behind a parked van, pauses in the middle of Gillerton Road, then disappears over a garden wall with a circular flourish of tail. An early tube train shudders beneath the paving stones; the reverberation is felt in the houses’ brickwork, their window frames, the floorboards and plasterwork. A percussive, trembling hum travels along the street, passing from one end of the terrace to the other. But the houses are used to it and so are the occupants. Tumblers judder together on kitchen shelves, a carriage clock on a mantelpiece in number four makes a half-strike; an earring left on a bedside table across the street rolls to the floor. Further down the row a woman turns over in bed; a baby wakes and finds itself inside the ribcage bars of its cot and wonders, what is this, and, where is everyone, and calls out for someone to come, now, please.
Aoife Riordan, walking down the middle of the road, hears the child’s cry. It makes her turn her head. Her gaze passes over the shut curtains, the limp-blossomed hydrangea bush in the front garden, the tricycle abandoned halfway up the path, but she doesn’t see these things, doesn’t register their existence. She is barely even aware of the child, still crying, or what made her look that way.
It is the most disconcerting sensation for Aoife, walking down this road. She is at once conscious of its utter familiarity – the way the sight of her own hand, the boned row of knuckles, the flat fingernails, are familiar – and its disquieting strangeness. It has the upsetting surreality of a dream, this walk down Gillerton Road at six a.m. in the middle of summer. What is she doing here? How did she come, in the space of a night, from the apartment in New York, where she and Gabe had been together for the first time in weeks, to this – a road she has walked down a thousand thousand times, to and from school, back from the corner shop carrying her mother’s cigarettes and a pound of flour, from those awful dance lessons, from her chess club after school, from the tube station? She feels light-headed and small waves of nausea keep breaking over her. She has thought, in the last three years, that she might never come back, might never walk down Gillerton Road again. And yet here she is. Here is the row of trees, roots rupturing the paving slabs. Here are the tiled front paths. Here is the triangular-capped concrete wall that runs along the fronts of five houses. She knows without putting her hand on it the exact rasping, grainy texture of the concrete, how it would feel to try to sit on its unyielding, unfriendly ridge, the way the inevitable slide off it would catch and mark the fabric of your serge school skirt. The adult Aoife suddenly sees that its shape is specifically designed to stop people – children – sitting on it and she is filled with disgust for the people in these houses who would put up such a wall. What kind of human being denies a rest to a child coming home from school?
Aoife gives the wall a kick.
Then she continues down Gillerton Road. Another eleven houses and she’ll be there.
She yanks her bag higher on her shoulder. It’s Gabe’s duffel-bag; her only suitcase disintegrated ages ago. Its presence is oddly comforting to Aoife. There is something in its worn, scuffed folds that is undeniably him, contains his essence. She is glad to have it here with her; it could almost be, standing in this street, that she’s slipped through a loophole in time and that he and New York don’t exist. The duffel-bag is proof. She didn’t make him up.
She looks up into the branches of the trees. Silver birches. She’d never noticed that before: they are all silver birches along this street, trunks peeling and curling, heart-shaped leaves limp and yellow. Poor things. When did they last have a bit of water? Hard to tell.
Everything looks smaller. Shorter. The trees, the houses, the kerbstones, the garden gates. As if the whole street has subsided a foot or so into the ground.
Aoife presses the toe of her sneaker into the soil around the tree. Nothing. Not even the slightest give. Just dry soil, the consistency of kiln-dried clay.
She should go. Silly to delay like this.
Another tube train passes beneath the road. Aoife stands still a moment longer, feeling its reverberations pass up into the soles of her feet, her shins, her thighbones, her pelvis and then her spine. London, the city, entering her, claiming her again.
She touches her hand to the silver-birch trunk: the crackle of bark against her palm. Then she walks on.
The house, when she comes to it, has a green front door. It gives Aoife a shock. It’s always been red, ever since she can remember. A cheerful colour, her mother always said, gives people a proper welcome. Her father would have painted it, standing out here in the clothes he kept specially for jobs like that – emulsion-pocked trousers, shirts with worn-out collars. When she was small, she would have been out there to help him, watching as he scorched off the old paint with a blowtorch that made the air around it shudder. Her father had never been one for chat – her mother had made up for that, of course, filling the airwaves in their house – but he would have let her help him tip the paint into the tray, would have stood by so she could watch the thick, red ooze spread itself into all four corners, perhaps rested a hand on her shoulder for a moment.
She thinks of her father walking down this path, knowing he was leaving, knowing he was off and not telling any of them. Where are you, she says, inside her head, where did you go?
As she stands there on the pavement, the front door, newly green, with the brass number ‘14’ slightly askew, opens. For a split second, Aoife thinks that her father is about to step out, to collect the milk from the step, that it’s all been a mistake, that he’s back, it was simply a misunderstanding.
But it’s not her father. It’s her mother, stepping over the threshold into the dawn-lit street, in slippers and a housecoat, easing the door closed behind her in a pantomime of consideration. Of course it’s her mother – she’s always had strange sleeping habits: those pills she constantly takes have wrecked her body clock. She looks older, Aoife thinks, with a slight shock. No, not older. More vulnerable somehow. Her hands anxious as they clutch the rim of a dustbin. Her hair dyed a peculiar teak colour, growing out. Can it only be three years?
‘Mum,’ she says.
Gretta whirls round, her face full of fear. She says, incongruously, ‘What?’
‘Mum,’ Aoife says again. ‘It’s me.’
‘Aoife?’
It strikes Aoife in that moment that her mother is the only one who can properly pronounce her name. The only person in whose mouth it sounds as it should. Her accent – still unmistakably Galway, after all these years – strikes the first syllable with a sound that is halfway between e and a, and the second with a mysterious blend of v and f. She drives the name precisely between both ‘Ava’ and ‘Eva’ and ‘Eve’, passing all three but never colliding with them. Aoife, she says, exactly, and like no one else.
‘Yes,’ Aoife replies, and puts down the duffel-bag.
There is a woman standing at the end of her path, speaking to Gretta in a voice she knows. She has a scarf bound around her head and a bag at her feet.
‘Dear God,’ Gretta says, and she almost drops the rubbish she’s holding. ‘Is that you?’
The air is
still at this hour, already thick with rising heat. Gretta gropes her way through it, the air between them, and then she has the girl by the arm, by the neck, by everything. She is right there in her arms, her third child, her surprise, her baby, her heartache. All the space and distance that has been separating them is gone, has been collapsed down. This is Aoife and she is here. She is surprised by many things but especially by the height of her. Gretta has always had it that Aoife is the same size as her – small, petite, however you want to say it. But now she sees that Aoife is taller than her by a good few inches. How did that happen?
‘What are you doing here?’ Her voice comes out as chiding; she can’t help it. ‘I was about to phone you. I know you’re five hours ahead so I—’
‘Behind.’
‘What?’
‘Behind. New York’s five hours behind, Mum. Not ahead.’
‘Well, anyway, I was going to tell you not to come. I don’t like to put you to all that trouble. Michael Francis told me you were planning on coming and I said to him, Michael Francis, don’t go bothering your sister with all this. She has her own life to lead and she won’t be wanting to coming over here to—’
‘Of course I’d come.’ Aoife pats her shoulder. ‘I did come. Here I am.’
Her daughter is gazing at her and Gretta feels that she must look a sight, out here on the front path at this hour of the morning. She puts her hands to her hair and then her cheeks. ‘Here you are,’ she whispers, then bursts into tears.
Michael Francis only realises that a fraught scenario involving a colleague and a bicycle is in fact a dream when he becomes aware that he is lying in an extremely narrow bed and that he can hear his sister, Aoife, talking.
He allows himself to roll on to his back – a bloody narrow bed this is, not made with men of six foot four in mind, not at all – and finds himself looking at a ceiling he knows by heart. The what-do-you-call-it, the slope thing that covers the right angle where the walls join with the ceiling – coving, is it? – in three tiers. As a boy, he used to long to invert the room so that he could walk in bare feet on that pristine white space, touch the light fitting, run his toe over the coving. Is the word coving? Monica’s husband would know. He’s a terrible one for the correct terms for things no one else cares about. What was the thing he was going on about the last time they saw him? The word for the gaps between the teeth in a comb. He’s forgotten it now, of course, but at the time he wanted to say: who cares? Who’d ever need a word like that?
His mind proceeds to display for him the realities of the day ahead, round and round, like horses on a carousel.
He’s in the room that was his for the first eighteen years of his life, the small one squeezed between where his parents sleep and the back room, which Monica and Aoife used to share.
His father has disappeared.
He had a row with Claire late last night, one of those terrifying rows where suddenly an end you never thought would come rears up in front of you, like a cliff edge you weren’t aware of. A row in which you can hear the roar of the sea below, the boom of waves against the rocks.
He doesn’t have to go to work. Not today, not tomorrow, not for six whole luxurious weeks. He has a summer’s respite from the job he loathes, the job he took because he had to, the job he thought would be temporary, the job of which his wife seems to have no appreciation whatsoever, no sense of the sacrifice he makes daily by performing it.
Aoife is here. She is back after three years.
She seems, he suddenly notices, to be speaking in a series of questions. He frowns, straining to hear what’s being said down there.
‘And what did he say?’
‘There was no further mention of it?’
‘How about the hospitals?’
‘Well, did you ask him?’
‘You’re sure there’s no sign of it?’
‘Is there someone there we can speak to?’
‘And there’s nothing else you can think of?’
It strikes him as odd that he can’t hear Gretta’s side of the conversation. Their mother has always had what a neighbour once politely referred to as ‘a very clear speaking voice’. His mother’s voice has blighted his life from an early age. He was six, possibly seven, in the lead at a school sports day sack race when he heard Gretta relating that Michael Francis still wet the bed. Needless to say, he did not win that particular race. At his wedding he was aware, even as he said his vows, that his mother was telling one of Claire’s aunts that she’d known he’d marry young because he had started ‘messing with himself’ at twelve. Which was altogether very early for ‘that kind of thing’, wasn’t it?
Claire claimed that it wasn’t as bad as he thought, that he was too sensitive about it. But his mother had always embarrassed him, always shown him up. He used to look at other mothers, on parents’ night, on Sunday-school outings, at street parties, on the steps after Mass, and wonder why he couldn’t have a mother like them. Slim, stylish, mostly silent. Why did his have to be so overweight, so eccentrically dressed, so loud, so uninhibited, so wild-haired, so keen to tell everyone her life story? He used to cringe at the sight of the tent-sized, flower-splotched frocks, run up in the evenings on the sewing-machine, the way her feet bulged over the straps of her shoes, her offers, often to complete strangers, of a sandwich from a plastic container, a sausage roll or a rock cake. It used to affect him physically – a weak, hot feeling in his limbs, a gathering of something behind his forehead. He used to insist on sitting apart from her on buses and trains, at any public gathering, just in case anyone made a connection between her and him.
‘There’s nothing else gone?’ Aoife is saying downstairs. ‘Would you like me to look?’
What has happened? he wonders, as he lies there. Could it be that the shock of his father leaving has affected their mother’s vocal cords?
Then he feels ashamed of himself.
He heaves himself out of bed, makes his way downstairs. In the doorway, he sees the reason for his mother’s apparent reticence. Gretta has her head in a cupboard.
She is given, bi-annually, perhaps less, to what she calls a ‘good old clear-out’. These rare frenzies of housework are often precipitated by trouble of one kind or another. A spat with Bridie, the new priest giving her ‘a funny look’, someone pushing in front of her in a queue, a doctor refusing to take one of her self-diagnoses seriously. For a day or two, she will stamp about the house, emptying shelves, pulling the contents out of wardrobes, yanking things out of drawers, sorting her stray ornaments and tablecloths and hoarded crap into heaps. A porcelain foal attached by a gold chain to its mother, missing only one leg, a snuff box with a jewelled lid, a bone-china teacup with a pattern of a Chinese lady crossing a bridge, minus its handle. All these treasures, collected over a lifetime of haggling in every jumble sale, every church bazaar, every junk shop in the area, will be tossed into random piles, some to keep, some to mend, some to give away. Then she will lose interest in the project. Back it will all go. The mantelpiece will be restocked, the shelves reloaded, the cupboards restuffed. Ready for next time.
‘Morning,’ he says. ‘Having a good old clear-out, are we?’
She rears back out of the cupboard and looks at him over the opened door and her face is so confused, so childlike in its bewilderment, that his irritation shrivels instantly. He realises that, just for a moment, she’d mistaken him for his father. Their voices are similar, have the same timbre. What a thing this is to happen at her age.
He crosses the room and gives her a hug. She protests, of course, but hugs him back. The coral ring tree she is holding gets spiked into his spine. And then someone else is in the room, darting out from the kitchen, someone with a mass of hair and a fierce grip on the back of his neck as she hugs him. He is saying her name, Aoife, but part of him refuses to believe it’s her because she looks so different.
‘Wait, let me see you.’ He pushes her to arm’s length. ‘My God,’ is all he can say.
‘What kin
d of a greeting is that?’
‘You look . . .’ He doesn’t know how to finish his sentence, doesn’t know what he wants to say. ‘Completely different’ isn’t right because she is still unmistakably her. But she’s also unrecognisable. He might, he sees, have walked past her in the street. She has more hair but that’s not it. Her face is thinner, perhaps, but that’s not it. She looks older, but that’s not it. Her clothes are different: none of that homemade, hippie-looking stuff she used to wear, but narrow trousers with zips coiling round the ankles and a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
He and his mother look her up and down.
‘Look at her,’ he says.
‘I know,’ says Gretta.
‘What?’ Aoife frowns and smiles at the same time.
‘All grown-up,’ Gretta says and dabs at her eyes with her sleeve.
‘Oh, stop it, I’ve been grown-up for years. You lot just never noticed.’ She turns on her heel and heads to the kitchen. ‘Who wants tea?’
Aoife holds the kettle under the tap but flinches when the jet of water shoots sideways, soaking her wrist. Something is not right. This house, which she has known all her life, is playing tricks on her. Doorways she has passed through ten thousand times seem suddenly narrower, catching her elbow on their sharp edges. Rugs she lay on as a baby, toddled over as a child, are conspiring to trip her, to catch in her shoes. Shelves are lower, able to land a blow on her temple. Light switches have moved from one side of a window to the other. Something is going on.
She dabs at her arm with a tea towel. The row of tea caddies over the oven is mesmeric in its familiarity. She hasn’t thought about them once in all her years away and yet she knows their every detail. The slightly dented lid of the red one, the rust patch on the green. ‘Bewley’s,’ they shout, in a thick, gold cursive script. Is it the jet lag, the being back, the absence of her father? She feels half crazed, isn’t sure what she will do or say.