‘No idea,’ Monica returns, too fast for someone who was really asleep, and Gretta nods with satisfaction. She knew she wasn’t really sleeping.
Monica rearranges the cardigan she has folded under her head and steals a glance at Gretta. Since their screaming match in Michael Francis’s house, they have not communicated. Monica still seethes and smarts with it; she will not speak to her mother, she will not, not until she gets an apology or an explanation. The hypocrisy of her, the web of lies she has spun. When she thinks of the time her mother found out she had slept with Joe before the wedding – calling her all those terrible names, telling her she would burn in Hell. She’d been so terrified, so sorry, when all the time her mother, her own mother, was living in extended mortal sin. It turns Monica’s mind inside out with disbelief.
But her mother is doing that thing she does when she knows she has annoyed someone: acting all blithe and innocent, pretending not to notice the frost in the atmosphere. She does it every time and if Monica were to say, why aren’t we speaking, Gretta would turn to her with wide, injured eyes and say, but I would never not speak to you, never, ever. She is fanning herself with a ferry timetable, her polyester dress with its patterns of ferns tight and damp across her back, and she is humming. Monica knows that the humming signifies Gretta mending her mood, much as a roofer might repair a faulty roof. Gretta hums and smooths things over in her head: the ex-offender brother-in-law, gone; the absconding husband, gone; the jaw-dropping fact of her unmarried state, gone. Everything lovely and normal again.
Gretta’s head is swivelling about. Monica knows that look, too, that expectant, gimlet gaze. Gretta is looking around for someone to engage in conversation. It makes Monica want to commit violence. How dare her mother be looking around for companions with whom to chat instead of doing what she should be doing, which is getting down on her knees and begging their forgiveness for lying to them their entire lives?
Spotting an elderly couple across the aisle, Gretta hails them with a booming, ‘Hot enough for you?’ The couple raise their heads, like startled sheep, but Gretta is in. She shunts herself along a couple of seats. ‘Are you on holiday?’ she asks. Within seconds, Monica knows, Gretta will have extracted a complete family history from the couple and a comprehensive travel itinerary and will be well on the way to returning the favour.
It’s midnight or thereabouts; Aoife can’t be sure. B-deck lounge is ablaze with light, and on every available surface people are sleeping. The corridors and aisles are filled with people stretched out under blankets and sleeping-bags. Bodies are curled up in doorways, on tables, on windowsills. Over by the shuttered-up cafeteria, someone at floor-level is emitting a throaty, drawn-out snore. The engines grind on and the boat rises and falls, rises and falls. Aoife, lying over two seats, tries not to see the tilting of the floor, the swinging of the overhead lamps, the way the door flings itself open, then pulls itself shut. She tries to think of other things, of the river delta of cracks on her apartment ceiling, of film-developing times, the way Gabe pushes his glasses back up his nose with the second joint of his index finger, the correct procedure with an enlarger and a filter. She tries to tell herself that the passage of the ship is moving her west, closer to Gabe and New York and her real life: it won’t be long now until she can go back, until she can try to fix things with him. But the waves keep coming; the boat rolls on; that man keeps snoring; the grille over the cafeteria rattles in its frame.
Aoife sits suddenly. She stands. She steps over the limbs and bags of her family. Gretta murmurs something but doesn’t fully wake.
Aoife makes it through the lounge into the corridor. Her mind is focused, her vision clear: she concentrates on this one task. She releases the handle to the toilets, she steps up and over the high metal threshold. She has her sights set on one of the cubicles and would have made it, were it not for the stench of vomit that hits her in the face like a fine mist. She is very clear in her movements. She knows she doesn’t have long. She won’t make the cubicle, she sees this, so takes a detour for the sink. She is just in time. She holds back her hair, she shuts her eyes, she braces herself. She is bent double by the force of it. She retches into the sink, once, twice and a painful third. She has never, she is thinking, been so sick before. She has never felt so terrible in her life. Her throat is rasped and sore, her stomach clenched like a fist, and those jittering flashes of light that have haunted her all her life are puncturing her vision again. She may never make Ireland: she may expire here, in these puke-washed toilets, and never see dry land. She turns the tap on before opening her eyes. She rinses her mouth, she sluices water over her face, she reaches for the roller towel, sees its grimy, grey, limp length, changes her mind, ducks into the cubicle for some toilet roll, presses it to her face and, as she does so, she is thinking about the oscillating pin-prick lights, those familiar, minuscule, airborne ghosts. How they mean a migraine might arrive, like a train at a station, one of those grinding, three-day fogs that can descend upon her. How they flicker and flutter like fireflies. How they come if she’s had too much coffee, or looks into bright light, or at the start of her period. How the last time she had them was on a cold day in late April when New York was assailed by wind, blowing off the Hudson, whirling paper and trash up off the sidewalk, driving smuts into her eyes, her hair, the seams of her clothes. How she cannot, at this moment, recall having had a period since then.
Aoife stands for a moment in the toilet, with the loo paper pressed over her face. Then she slowly peels it off. She regards herself in the mirror. Her face has a waxen, yellowish look, her eyes are sunken, wide and disbelieving. It is as if it was another person who stepped in here a minute ago. This person, in the mirror, this Aoife, is someone else entirely.
She lurches along the corridor, gripping first the left-hand rail and then, as the prow of the boat dips, the right. She forces open the salt-spattered door and steps out on to the deck.
If there is a heatwave, this particular stretch of the Irish Sea is unaware of it. The wind immediately seizes her hair, her clothes and tries to tear them from her. She bends her head into the force and makes it to the barrier, where she clings on. She can see the rusted side of the vessel, dropping down to the boiling, iron-black waters. Great furls of spume fan out from the boat’s path. Yards out to sea, they are flattened, obliterated, then claimed by the waves. Sea spray or rain, she can’t tell which, is being hurled at her in great gouts. She is filled with an urge to shout something, anything, into this wind, into the sea, just to feel the feebleness of her voice, its ineffectuality against these Zeus-like, clashing elements.
‘Christ!’ she bawls. ‘Shit!’
She can’t hear herself. She only knows that she is making the sound because her brain and tongue and mouth are forming the words. She clings to the cold railing with both hands; she lays her head on them, feeling the humming vibration of the boat, the surging of the sea.
The first time she and Gabe slept together was – when? She opens her eyes briefly, sees her wet fingers, patches of rust, thick white paint, the consistency of hardened toffee. Her mind is free-wheeling, unable to gain purchase but she finds the answer, she knows it.
April. The morning before she left for Connecticut.
Her travel alarm clock had shrilled out at six a.m., hoicking her from a dream about cycling through Clissold Park to a room that seemed suddenly changed overnight. She was always alone in that room but not that morning. She flailed at the alarm clock and knocked it to the floor. It closed in on itself, its ringing muted, obliging, apologetic.
Next to her Gabe grunted, rolled over and clamped her into a one-armed embrace. ‘You’d better,’ he mumbled into her hair, ‘have a watertight excuse for waking me up this early.’
‘Hmm,’ she managed, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She did not share Gabe’s talent for morning eloquence. She put one foot out of the bed. She put out the other and stood up. She fished around on the floor for something – anything – to put on, finding a p
air of trousers, hers, Gabe’s sweatshirt and some socks that neither fitted nor matched.
By the time Gabe emerged from the sheets, she was properly dressed, hair tied back, finishing her coffee and putting on lipstick.
‘How can you do that without a mirror?’ Gabe said, from the doorway, watching her as she shut her lipstick with a click. They grinned at each other, then looked away. He reached across the table for her coffee cup and took a swig.
‘Jesus,’ he said, wincing. ‘Has anyone ever told you you make terrible coffee?’
She stood. ‘No. Other people who have stolen my coffee have been very complimentary.’
He followed her to the sink and put his arms around her from behind. ‘Well, then, they’re idiots with no tastebuds.’ He lifted her hair and started kissing her neck. ‘Where are you going, anyway? It’s practically the middle of the night.’
Rinsing out her breakfast bowl under the tap, she said, ‘I’m going to a nudist colony.’
Gabe was momentarily stalled in his exploration of her neckline. ‘Now, if anyone else said that to me, I’d assume they were joking. But you’re not, are you?’
‘Nope. Evelyn’s doing some portraits.’
‘I’d kind of guessed that. I didn’t think you’d become a nudist or anything.’ His hands parted her blouse from her waistband. ‘Although, if you had, I’d be all for it.’
‘Gabe, I have to go.’
‘I know.’ But his hands were latched on to her breasts and he had wedged her against the sink.
‘I really have to go.’ She twisted round within the circle of his arms and faced him. ‘I’ll be back in three days.’
‘Three days? That long?’
‘I can’t come back to bed now, Gabe. I honestly can’t.’
Gabe swept the crockery and cutlery from the counter into the sink. ‘Who said anything about the bed?’
She nearly missed the train to Connecticut. She reapplied her lipstick as she sat opposite Evelyn in the carriage. They went to the nudist colony. They spent their time photographing naked people sitting on deckchairs, standing at a barbecue, playing ping-pong. When she got back, she went to the restaurant to find him and when he’d caught sight of her, through the steam and chaos of the kitchen, what his face had shown was mostly relief.
On the ferry to Ireland, Aoife peers out into the furious black night. How, in God’s name, had this happened? The first time was the night before she left for Connecticut and there had been numerous times in between but they had used something, she knows they did, every time. Her last period was when? A couple of weeks before Connecticut. Three months, maybe. Could it be that long, could it—
‘Are you about to throw up or have you just done so?’ Michael Francis, who has appeared from nowhere, asks.
Aoife rears her head, like a frightened horse. Her face is wet, rain-lashed, her hair wild. She stares at him as if she doesn’t recognise him.
‘You OK?’ he says, patting his pockets. ‘I have a mint here somewhere, if you want it.’
She shakes her head. ‘No, thanks.’
‘I always thought you were the one with the iron stomach,’ he says, putting an arm about her shoulders. ‘Maybe you lost it out there in New York.’
‘Maybe I did,’ she says, looking out to sea, still gripping the rail.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Enough with the King Lear-ing. Let’s go inside.’
She shook her head again. ‘I’m going to stay out here.’
‘Really? It’s bloody cold.’
‘I know. I’m enjoying the novelty.’
‘OK. Suit yourself. I’ll see you later.’
Michael Francis staggers back across the slippery deck, forces open the door and steps inside. He gives her a wave from behind it. She removes one of her hands from the railing to wave back. She watches the lit windows of the lounge until she sees him reappear, sees him lope across the room, then wedge himself next to Claire and Hughie, sees him accept the sleeping form of Vita, laying her gently across his lap.
He’d come out to find her. The thought makes her almost smile.
The ferry rises and falls, with an inexorable rhythm, bearing her onwards. Aoife keeps holding on to the railing with both hands. If she stays like this, she tells herself, everything will be OK.
She doesn’t understand. This thought sits, heavy as wet cloth, in her head. She doesn’t understand at all. She’s careful about this kind of thing, a lot more careful than other people. In some areas of life she knows she is a little lax, a little complacent, but not with contraception, partly because she knows what a useless parent she’d make. What kind of a mother would she be if she couldn’t even read a bedtime story? How the hell did this happen? And how can she have been so stupid as not to notice? She tries for a moment to picture it, the being clinging to her insides, the way that silent-movie actor grips the clock’s hands as he dangles above traffic, but she cannot. She cannot, she cannot, she cannot account for this. She cannot even begin to think what Gabe will say. She cannot do this.
By a concentrated feat of human origami, they have managed to fit into Michael Francis’s car, Michael Francis driving, Gretta next to him, Monica, Claire and Aoife on the back seat, taking it in turn to have Vita on their knees, and Hughie in the boot, rolling around on top of the bags.
For the first leg of the journey, coming off the ferry and negotiating their way from the docks, through Cork and on to the road north, Aoife sat in the middle, wedged between Claire and Monica. But just outside the city she’d had to get out to throw up into a patch of dock leaves, then again two miles further on, after they had been up and over a humpbacked bridge. After that, she had been stationed by the door, with the window rolled right down and the breeze blowing over her. Hughie complained about the wind, said it made his hair feel funny, but Gretta told him, from the front seat, to stop his complaining.
Only Monica noticed the way Claire twisted her head at this, the way she cast an unreadable glance at her son.
After that, for a while, everyone was quiet.
Michael Francis is keeping his thoughts very practical: after Limerick, they head straight up towards Galway, then towards the coast. He is aware of his wife, sitting at his back, with her arms around their daughter. He is not thinking about her, he is not thinking about the fact that she came, that she gave up going to a tutorial to accompany him to Ireland, he is not thinking about that, and what it might mean for them, not at all. He is also not thinking about his father and his marrying an Irish girl from Sligo and his brother running off with his bride the day after the wedding and the possibility that there might be another Riordan half-sibling out there.
Aoife is letting the air blast into her face and, with her eyes shut, is inking a diagram in her head of their positions in the car, with unbroken lines for those who are communicating and dotted lines for those who aren’t. Those in the second category: her and Monica, Monica and Gretta, Michael Francis and Claire, Hughie and Vita (after a brief spat over a packet of Refreshers). She is also picturing her father searching the streets of Dublin for his bride and his brother. Which of them had he wanted to find, most of all? She tries to inhabit this scene: her father asking at boarding-houses, at the docks. The unbearable familiarity of the face you were searching for. Did Frankie look like him? She can feel the flare and crackle of his anger, his heartbreak. How would it feel if your own brother betrayed you like that, stole away the girl you loved?
Monica’s thoughts run along one track: she hates this car, she hates this trip, she hates this whole family; she wishes she had never come: she wishes she had not worn her plaid dress as the car is so cramped that it will look crushed when they finally get out, if they ever get out.
Claire is looking, every now and again, at the back of her husband’s head, at the glimpses of his hands on the wheel, at the section of his brow, just visible in the angled rear-view mirror, watching the back of the seat strain as he shifts his weight. She is feeling the strange dichotomy of a long m
arriage, when a person can seem at once toweringly familiar and curiously alien. She is feeling the hot, dense weight of Vita, the small rounded heels pressing into her thigh. She turns her head and Hughie instantly raises his eyes, alert; he looks to her still for explanation, for signs, for clues on how to behave, how to react, what to expect from the world. She smiles her most reassuring smile and he lies back among the luggage, satisfied.
And Gretta? Gretta is thinking about serendipity, all the coincidences of the world: how your husband can go off, disappear, you can search all over for him, call the police, rake through his possessions but really all you need is a call on the telephone from a cousin remarking how someone had told someone that they had seen Robert walking along the driveway of the convent up the road, and wasn’t that a strange thing?
Gretta smiles to herself. She’d told them all, these children of hers, who think they’re so clever with their calls to the police and their insistence on searching the house, that things would work out. And work out they have. The day before, they’d stood on the pavement outside Michael Francis’s house, Monica shouting those awful things at her, Aoife telling Monica to shut her face, Michael Francis trying to keep the peace, as ever, saying they knew where Dad was now, let’s concentrate on that. Gretta and Monica had got back to the house in a terrible, frayed tangle. And then what had happened? They had packed for Ireland.
Gretta moves her handbag from her knee to the floor of the car, then back. She’d always known it would come good, that they’d find him. And here they all are, off the night ferry, going up to Connemara.
Past Limerick, Aoife says, ‘Stop, please.’ Michael Francis swerves to the side of the road and she bursts out of the car.
‘Aunt Evie is sick a lot,’ Hughie observes, with interest, from the boot.
‘Don’t watch, sweetheart, it’s not polite,’ Claire murmurs. ‘Look away.’
‘She is,’ Monica says.
‘It’s Aoife, Hughie, not Evie,’ Michael Francis says. ‘Ee-fah.’