Aoife makes her way slowly down the stairs. She isn’t sure what to do. It’s just before dawn. Everyone is asleep. Her book is locked in with her sister. She feels peculiarly awake, as if her body has woken her to say, time you were at work, off you go to the club.
In the front room she is confronted by the shocking sight of her father’s desk, its lid gaping open, its contents scattered all over the floor. She’s never seen it open before, let alone disembowelled like this. Did Monica leave it like that? she wonders. And what did Gretta say when she saw it? That would have been an interesting conversation to witness, although, thinking about it, Gretta probably said nothing at all to Monica. Probably said: whatever you think is best, darling, yes, throw your father’s things around, I’ll clear up after you, don’t you worry.
Aoife sits down heavily in her father’s desk chair and pushes her hair out of her eyes. It’s so hot. How can it be this hot? It seems hotter down here than upstairs, which can’t be right because everyone knows that heat rises.
She eyes things strewn around the desk: sheets of paper, old passports with their corners clipped, receipts, letters. The sight of an insignia on one bit of paper makes Aoife shudder but she isn’t sure why. She snatches it up and realises it’s the school crest. Our duty to God, the swirling script underneath it reads; she knows this because they were reminded of it, daily, in those interminable assemblies. She glances down it and sees line upon line of typescript before she tosses it away from her.
She is contemplating making coffee or maybe tidying this stuff up or perhaps going out into the garden when she puts her head down on her father’s desk. The leather is warm under her cheek, smooth, the smell of polish, paper, ink soothing. She eyes the room, tilted sideways, and thinks she’s never seen it from this angle before, which is odd, and then the next thing she is thinking is how loud her mother’s voice is, talking like that behind her.
Aoife sits up, lifting her head from the desk, and finds that the room is filled with plinths of light, placed lengthways along the carpet. Is it possible that she fell asleep again?
‘You don’t say . . .’ her mother is saying. ‘Well now . . . and what did he say to . . . never . . .’
Gretta is talking to Ireland: Aoife can tell by the extra lean in her voice, the slightly more sibillant s, the softer t. It’ll be one of her many relatives; they always seem to call at strange hours. A phone call at six in the morning is nothing to them.
Aoife staggers upright, across the room and into the kitchen, where she looks about her. What to eat? There is a box of cereal standing on the table, her mother’s bowl, with a spoon disappearing into milk. The loaf of bread on the counter looks dry, concave across its incision. Aoife leans into the sink and, turning on the tap, drinks from its flow. She is just sitting down at the table with an apple from the fruit bowl when she realises her mother is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, hands in her dressing-gown pockets.
‘What?’ Aoife says.
Gretta looks at her, unfocused.
‘What’s the matter?’
Aoife gets up, goes to her mother, takes her hands in hers and steers her to a chair. ‘Who was that on the phone?’
‘Mary,’ Gretta whispers.
Mary. A friend, a neighbour, a relative, Our Lady?
‘Dermot’s wife,’ Gretta whispers again.
Aoife, still none the wiser, says, ‘Ah.’
Gretta covers her face with her hands. ‘Get me my pills, would you, Aoife? I’ve a terrible head on me.’
Aoife goes to her mother’s pharmacopoeia, kept in a kitchen cupboard. There are about twenty-five bottles, all of differing sizes. Aoife picks up two at random, glares at the labels, puts them down, picks up two more. ‘Jesus, Mum, what are all these for?’
‘Never you mind. Just give us the . . . the pink ones.’
‘Seriously, what are they? You shouldn’t be taking all these. Who prescribes them?’
‘Aoife.’ Gretta is holding a hand to her head. ‘Just give them to me.’
Aoife is getting all the bottles out of the cupboard and lining them up. ‘Does the doctor know you’ve got all these? Mum, you’ve enough Valium here to fell a horse and you really shouldn’t—’
‘Monica says—’
‘Oh, Monica says.’ Aoife slams a bottle of something beginning with P on to the counter. ‘Monica would benefit from a bit of Valium herself,’ she mutters. ‘Give us all a break.’
Gretta barges across the kitchen, snatches up a bottle, tips two into her palm and swallows them dry. She turns to Aoife. ‘They,’ she says, ‘have seen him.’
Aoife turns away from the bottles towards her mother. ‘Seen who?’
‘Your father.’
Aoife examines her mother. Gretta looks odd, her eyes wild, her skin white as parchment. ‘Who’s seen him?’ she asks warily, thinking, please don’t say anything like the little folk or the spirits. Gretta could sometimes go off on superstitious rambles and it could be hard to bring her back.
Gretta sighs. ‘Didn’t I just say? Dermot and Mary.’
Aoife is about to snap, who the hell are Dermot and Mary, but stops herself. ‘Where?’
Gretta glares at her, as if Aoife is being particularly stupid. ‘On the Roundstone road.’
‘What’s the Roundstone road?’
‘What’s the Roundstone— Are you out of your mind?’
‘No,’ Aoife shouts. She has had enough. ‘I’m very much in my mind. Now will you stop talking in bloody riddles and tell me what’s happened?’
‘Roundstone,’ Gretta shouts back, ‘is a place in Connemara, which you would know if you’d ever listened to a word I said, if you behaved as if you were part of this family, instead of going off and—’
‘And what?’ Aoife demands. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘Ach.’ Gretta waves a hand at her. She opens the back door and disappears out of it.
Aoife stands in the kitchen, eyes shut, fists balled. She registers a desire to see Gabe, to stand with him. She would give almost anything, she thinks, to be able to lay her hand on his shoulder at this precise moment, to have him here in this kitchen with her, his face clear of judgement.
After a moment, she goes out of the door, down the steps and towards her mother. Gretta is sniffing into a hankie by the dried-up laburnum. She can tell, as she gets nearer, that their mutual anger has blown away, like clouds off a landscape. She puts her arms around her mother and says, ‘Tell me.’
Aoife rings Michael Francis’s bell again, then lifts the knocker. It’s just before eight. She has walked from Gillerton Road, all the way to Stoke Newington. She has seen postmen, bin lorries, milk vans. She has seen empty buses ploughing along empty roads. She has seen the sun insinuate itself into the lightening sky, the streets rise into illumination. Not such an anti-social hour to come calling. And don’t people with children always get up early?
Before she can let the lion-faced knocker fall, the door is wrenched open and there is Monica, a dressing-gown held closed at her throat.
Aoife is so astonished she almost steps back to look up at the house. She is sure, so sure, that she’s walked to her brother’s house. But perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps Monica moved here and no one told her.
‘It’s you,’ she says instead.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I might ask you the same question.’ Monica sighs. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘Just before eight.’
Monica thrusts her arm out of her dressing-gown sleeve. ‘Seven,’ she says. ‘Quarter to seven.’
‘Oh.’ Aoife looks down at her own watch, which says, unmistakably, eight. ‘Maybe I didn’t . . . set it right.’
Monica swivels on her bare foot and disappears into Michael Francis’s house. After a moment, Aoife follows.
Monica is in the kitchen, snapping the lid down on the kettle. ‘Where’s Mum?’ she says, without turning round.
Ao
ife slides into a seat at her brother’s table, moving aside a cricket bat, a cat collar, a comic and a doll’s teacup. ‘Asleep,’ Aoife answers, employing the same clipped tone as her sister. Two can play at that game, she thinks. And: You damn well owe me an apology, several in fact, and I’m not going to let you forget it. In irritation, she snatches up a small, unidentifiable piece of orange plastic and turns it in her hand.
Michael Francis slumps into the kitchen, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of underpants. ‘Jesus,’ he says, yawning in Aoife’s direction, ‘was that you ringing the bell?’
Aoife nods. ‘Sorry.’
‘What time do you call this?’
‘My watch was wrong.’
Monica lifts the kettle from the hob. ‘She’d set it wrong,’ she says.
In her sister’s tone, Aoife hears it all, the entire script of her upbringing: Aoife the dunce, Aoife the idiot, Aoife the girl who can’t tell left from right, who can’t read or write, who can’t manage a knife and fork together, who can’t tie her own shoelaces.
‘It was a mistake!’ she shrieks, gripping the orange-plastic thing (she thinks it may be part of a larger toy or some kind of vehicle). ‘I’d just got off a transatlantic flight! I set my watch wrong. That’s all. It doesn’t make me an idiot. I’ve apologised. What else do you want me to do?’
Her brother and sister are staring at her, as if they know they have seen her somewhere before but can’t quite place her. They turn away from her in unison, Monica to the kettle, Michael Francis to get down some mugs, leaving her alone with her ire.
Aoife has to resist the urge to grind her teeth, to throw something at the wall. Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?
‘Look,’ she says, trying to level her voice, ‘I wanted to tell you both. Someone’s seen Dad. In Ireland.’
‘Someone?’ Monica says, turning round. ‘Who?’
‘Mary. And Declan. Whoever the hell they are.’
‘Mary and Declan?’ Michael Francis tries out the names as he sits at the table, a cereal box tucked under one arm.
‘Mary’s married to Dermot,’ Monica says, ‘not Declan. He’s Mum’s cousin on her father’s side. Lives out beyond Derrylea.’
Aoife and Michael Francis look at each other.
‘Anyway,’ Aoife says, breaking eye contact with her brother, ‘they phoned this morning at some ungodly hour to say that someone had seen Dad near a place called Roundstone. He was coming out of a convent of all bloody things. The last place you’d think to look. It was some cousin of a cousin and apparently Dad stopped and had a chat, then went on his way.’
‘That makes no sense.’ Monica’s face is unreadable, fierce. ‘None at all,’ she says, and her hand darts to her neckline. ‘What would he be doing there? And at a convent? And why would he go without telling any of us?’
‘Where’s Mum?’ Michael Francis asks.
‘She’s . . .’ Aoife waves a hand in the air, ‘. . . at home. She had one of her turns. She went all weird, anyway. Took some pill or other, then went and shut herself in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out. By the way, have either of you seen the number of pills she’s got?’
They ignore her. ‘Did she say anything else?’ Monica demands. ‘Anything at all?’
Aoife wrinkles her forehead, trying to remember. She had helped her mother into the house and up the stairs; at the bedroom door, Gretta had shaken her off and disappeared into the room alone. She’d said she needed a lie-down but Aoife could hear her moving about in there.
‘No,’ Aoife says, ‘but something’s up. She knows something but isn’t letting on. She had a whole bad-head drama—’
‘Ah,’ says Michael Francis, ‘the eternal smokescreen.’
‘Not at all!’ says Monica, putting down her teacup. ‘What a thing to say. She has high blood pressure, you know that, and to suggest that she’s faking her bad heads is just—’
‘Do either of you know who Frankie is?’ Aoife says, over Monica. ‘She said, “Why didn’t I think of Frankie?” but then wouldn’t tell me any more, so I was wondering—’
‘Frankie,’ her brother says, ‘was Dad’s brother.’
Aoife looks at him. She looks at her sister. She looks back at her brother. ‘What?’ she says.
‘His brother.’
‘He doesn’t have a brother.’
‘Yes, he does. Or did, rather. He died. In the Troubles. Years ago, before we were born. You knew that, didn’t you?’
Aoife cannot speak. She has to hold in her breath, not let any of it escape. She feels herself filling with rage, from the bottom up. Rage, not at her father for disappearing, for walking out of their lives without a backward glance, for leaving their mother in the lurch, for apparently having had a brother. It is rage at her siblings. At all of them. For keeping this from her. Their father had a brother? The idea is outlandish, unheard-of, ridiculous. But why has no one ever told her? Why has she, yet again, been left out?
Her siblings are looking at her with that mixture of superiority and pity. She is again a pygmy, a Lilliputian in the shadow of their implacable knowledge. She is again five, asking her mother one night how the kittens got in the cat’s tummy and wondering, in the blistering gale of their laughter, what Monica and Michael Francis found so funny and why she couldn’t join in. She can recall asking them whether it was morning or afternoon and whether she’d had lunch yet and the look they gave her was the same as this one: a pitying glance, cast down from a Mount Olympus of experience. She has no chance of ever catching up; even to try would be futile.
‘You knew that,’ Monica says, sliding into the seat next to Michael Francis.
‘I didn’t.’
‘You must have done.’ Monica slips a diet sweetener into her tea.
‘You must have done,’ Michael Francis echoes, but he’s looking doubtful now. ‘She didn’t know.’ He’s speaking to Monica again. ‘How can she not have known?’
They turn to look at her with curiosity, and Aoife feels their gazes start to prickle her skin, as if she is near something to which she is allergic, like pollen or wool. Monica is murmuring how it wasn’t ever talked about, hardly ever mentioned, maybe Aoife just missed it, maybe it had ceased to be something spoken about by the time she had come along, hadn’t he died years ago—
A child appears in the doorway and they all fall silent. She is naked, apart from a pair of rainbow wellies, worn, Aoife notices, on the wrong feet. She holds, by its tail, a one-eyed tiger. ‘Who are you?’ she says, pointing at Aoife.
‘Aoife Magdalena Riordan,’ Aoife says, pointing back. ‘Who are you?’
‘Vita Clarissa Riordan.’
They regard each other for a moment. The tiger does a slow, aerial turn, his single eye trained on the floor.
‘Why have we got the same name?’ Vita says.
‘Because we’re related. I’m your daddy’s sister.’
Vita frowns. ‘That’s Daddy’s sister.’ She stabs a finger in Monica’s direction.
‘I’m the other one.’
Vita sidles across the kitchen and comes to stand at the table’s edge. She places the tiger squarely in front of her so that it is looking straight at Aoife.
‘What happened to your tiger’s eye?’
‘Pulled it off.’
‘Oh.’
‘With my teeth.’
‘How come?’
‘Did not like it, not one little bit.’
‘Fair enough.’
Vita puts her head on one side. ‘What is it like off the rails?’
Aoife leans forward. ‘What was that?’
‘Granny says—’
Michael Francis looks up from his cereal. ‘Vita—’
‘Granny says what?’
‘Granny says you’ve gone off the rails.’
‘Does she now? That’s very interesting. What else does Granny say about me
?’
‘She says you’ve thrown it all away, that you had chances she never—’
‘Vita,’ Michael Francis says, ‘that’s enough.’
‘Shall I tell you something, Vita?’
‘What?’
‘You know what it’s like off the rails? It’s great. It’s grand. It’s—’
‘Aoife,’ Michael Francis says, ‘that’s enough.’ He puts his hands over his eyes. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, through his fingers.
Vita and Aoife look at him.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Vita moans with glee, covering her own eyes.
‘Don’t let Granny hear you say that,’ Aoife says.
Monica says, ‘Michael Francis, do you still have that bit of paper?’
Aoife says, ‘What bit of paper?’
Michael Francis says, ‘Yes,’ and digs in his pocket.
Aoife says, ‘What bit of paper? Why haven’t you told me about a bit of paper? Why am I the last to know?’
Michael Francis hands it to her, saying, ‘. . . and they say the end is coming.’
Aoife says, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Vita, laying a hand on Aoife’s arm, says, ‘He didn’t tell me either.’
Aoife and Michael Francis argue for a long time over whether they should bring Gretta here or whether they should all go over to Gillerton Road. Michael Francis keeps saying that they have to confront Gretta, that they need a family conference. He uses that phrase over and over again: a family conference. Maybe, Monica thinks, it’s something he got from school. If they all go over to Gillerton Road, how should they travel? Tube or bus or car? If they do go over there, should they all go? Is there enough room in the car? Is it wise to wake Gretta or should they let her sleep? Maybe they should leave it until after lunch.
Monica stands in her brother’s back garden. She can hear them batting the subject back and forth, with occasional interjections from Claire and Vita. She stands with her toes curled into the lip of a crevasse that has opened up across the lawn, a fork of dark lightning through the yellowed grass.
‘We’ve lost seven cars down there,’ says a voice to her right.
She turns to see her nephew. He is wearing a pair of pyjama bottoms, his hair sleep-rumpled, his chest bare, his ribcage delicate, branch-like under his thin white skin. He eats from a bowl of cornflakes with a motion as regular as the ticking of a clock.