My eye fell upon a large leather-bound book in non-fiction. It was brown, thick, no author’s name or title along the spine. I pulled it out. It was heavy. The pages were jagged along the edges as though they’d been ripped. ‘So you’re like a Robin Hood of the book world,’ I said, as soon as the old woman had left with a racy romance under her arm, ‘bringing books to those who have none?’
‘Something like that. What have you got there?’
‘Don’t know, there’s no title on the front.’
‘Try the spine.’
‘Not there, either.’
He picked up a folder from beside him and licked his finger before flicking through some pages. ‘What’s the author’s name?’
‘There’s no author’s name.’
He frowned and looked up. ‘Not possible. Open it up and see what’s on the first page.’
‘I can’t,’ I laughed. ‘It’s locked.’
‘Oh, come on,’ he smiled, ‘you’re taking the piss, Goodwin.’
‘I’m not,’ I laughed, moving towards him. ‘Honestly, look.’
I passed it to him and our fingers brushed, causing a tingle of seismic proportions to rush through every single erogenous zone that existed in my body.
The pages of the book were closed with a gold clasp and attached to that was a small gold padlock.
‘What the hell…’ he said, trying to pull at the lock, making a series of grimaces that had me smiling. ‘Trust you to choose the only book in here that doesn’t have an author or title and is padlocked.’
We both started laughing. He gave up on the padlock and our eyes locked.
This was the bit where I was supposed to say, ‘I’m only sixteen.’ But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I told you, I felt older. Everybody always thought I looked older. I wanted to be older. It wasn’t like we were going to have sex on the floor, he wasn’t going to be in prison for staring at me. But still. I should have said it then. If we were in some old Gone with the Wind-style southern early nineteenth-century book, back in the good old days where women were men’s property and weren’t protected at all, then it wouldn’t have mattered, we could have rolled around in the hay in a barn somewhere and done whatever we wanted and nobody would have been accused of anything. I felt like hunting down that book from the shelves, opening it and jumping into the pages with him. But we weren’t. It was the twenty-first century. I was sixteen, very nearly seventeen, and he was twenty-two. I’d seen it on his ID card. I had experience in knowing that a guy’s horn didn’t last until my seventeen birthday. It was rare they felt like coming back in July.
‘Don’t look so sad,’ he said, and reached out and lifted my chin with his finger. I hadn’t realised he’d come so close to me and there he was, right before me. Toe to toe.
‘It’s only…a book.’
I realised I was hugging it close to me, both my arms wrapped around it tightly.
‘But I like the book,’ I smiled.
‘I like the book too, very much. It’s a cheeky very pretty book, but it’s obvious we can’t read it right now.’
My eyes narrowed, wondering if we were talking about the same thing.
‘So, that means we’ll both just have to sit and look at it, until we find the key.’
I smiled, and I felt my cheeks pink.
‘Tamara!’ I heard my name being called. A screeching, desperate call. We stopped gazing at one another and I rushed to the door of the bus. It was Rosaleen. She was running across the road toward me her face scrunched up, her eyes wild and dangerous. Arthur was standing on the pavement beside his car, looking calm. I relaxed a little then. What had Rosaleen all riled up?
‘Tamara,’ she said, breathless. She looked from Marcus to me, appearing like a meerkat again, on high alert. ‘Come back to us, child. Come back,’ she said, her voice shaky.
‘I am coming back,’ I frowned. ‘I’ve only been gone an hour.’
She looked a little confused then, looked at Marcus as if he was going to explain everything.
‘What’s wrong Rosaleen? Is Mum okay?’
She was silent. Her mouth opened and closed as if she was trying to find words.
‘Is she okay?’ I asked again, panic building.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course she’s fine.’ She still looked confused, but beginning to calm.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I thought you’d…’ she trailed off, looking around the village now and, as though realising where she was, she stood up straight, ran a hand across her hair to smooth it down, fixed her dress which was crumpled from the drive. She took small breaths and she visibly calmed before us. ‘You’re coming back to the house?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I frowned. ‘I told Mum where I was going.’
‘Yes, but your mother…’
‘My mother what?’ My voice hardened. If everything was so okay with my mother, then my telling her should have been fine.
Marcus’s hand was on my back, his thumb comfortingly circling the small of my back, reminding me of Mexico, of all the other places I could be.
‘You should go with her,’ Marcus said quietly. ‘I have to move on now, anyway.You can hold on to that.’ He nodded at the book I was hugging in my arms.
‘Thanks. See you again?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Of course, Goodwin. Now go.’
As I walked across the road and sat in the back of the Land Rover, I noticed the three male smokers standing outside the pub, staring. It’s not unusual to be stared at but it was the way they were staring. Arthur nodded at them. Rosaleen kept her head down, her eyes to the floor. The three men’s eyes followed us, and I stared back, hoping to figure out what exactly was their problem. Was it because I was new? But I knew it wasn’t, because they weren’t looking at me. All eyes were on Arthur and Rosaleen. In the car, nobody said a word the entire way home.
Inside the house, I went to check on Mum despite Rosaleen telling me not to. She was still sitting in the rocking chair, not rocking, and looking out at the garden. I sat with her a while and then left. I went downstairs to the living room, back to the armchair I’d been sitting in before Marcus called. I reached for the photo album but it was gone. Tidied away by Rosaleen again. I sighed and searched for it again on the bookshelf. It was gone. I went through every single book on that shelf, but it was nowhere to be found.
I heard a creak at the door and I spun round. Rosaleen was standing there.
‘Rosaleen!’ I said, hand flying to my heart. ‘You scared me.’
‘What were you doing?’ she asked, her fingers creasing and then smoothing the apron over her dress.
‘I was just looking for a photo album I saw earlier.’
‘Photo album?’ She cocked her head sideways, her forehead wrinkled, her face pinched in confusion.
‘Yes, I saw it earlier, before the library came by. I hope you don’t mind, I took it out to look at it but now it’s…’ I held my hands up in the air and laughed. ‘It has mysteriously vanished.’
She shook her head. ‘No, child.’ She looked behind her and then lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Now hush about it.’
Arthur entered then, with a newspaper in his hand and she went quiet. He glanced from me to her.
She looked at Arthur nervously. ‘I better see to the dinner. Rack of lamb tonight,’ she said quietly.
He nodded and watched her leave the room.
The way he watched her made me not want to ask Arthur about the album. The way he watched her made me think a lot of things about Arthur.
Later that evening, I heard them in their bedroom, muffled sounds that rose and fell. I wasn’t sure if it was an argument or not but it felt different from the way they usually talked. It was a conversation, instead of a series of comments thrown to one another. Whatever they were talking about, they were trying hard for me not to hear them. I had my ear up against the wall, wondering about their sudden silence, when my bedroom door opened and Arthur was there staring at me.
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‘Arthur,’ I said, moving away from the wall, ‘you should knock. I need my privacy.’
Considering he’d just caught me with my ear to the wall he did well not to say anything.
‘Do you want me to bring you to Dublin in the morning?’ he grumbled.
‘What?’
‘To stay with a friend.’
I was so delighted, I punched the air and got straight on the phone to Zoey, either forgetting to pursue or not caring as to the sudden reason for my expulsion. And so that was the time I went to stay with Zoey. It had been only two nights in the gatehouse and already I felt different returning to Dublin. We went back to our usual patch on the beach beside my house. It looked different and I hated it. It felt different and I hated that too. By the entrance gate to my house a For Sale sign had been erected. I couldn’t look at it without my blood boiling, my heart rate rising and feeling an overwhelming desire to scream like a banshee, so I didn’t look. Zoey and Laura were already studying me as though I had landed from another planet, gutted their best friend and zipped on her outer layer of skin like a sleeping suit, and everything I said was being picked at, analysed, misconstrued.
Seeing the For Sale sign, my two friends, with the sensitivity of a ‘Geronimo’ became excited. Zoey chattered incessantly about breaking into the house and spending the afternoon there, as though at that exact time in my life that was the appropriate thing to say. Laura, a little more genteel, looked uncertainly at me while Zoey’s back was turned to face the gate and assess the situation, but when I didn’t object, she went along with the idea, swept out into sea like a freshly flushed shit.
I don’t know how I did it but I managed to kill the excitement for raiding my repossessed house in which my father had killed himself. Instead we got drunk and plotted against Arthur and Rosaleen and their evil country ways. I told them—no I didn’t just tell them, I revealed to them—about Marcus and the bus of books and they laughed, thinking him an absolute dork, thinking of the travelling library as the most ridiculously boring thing that they had ever heard of. It was bad enough to have a room full of books but to make books even more accessible, well, that was a downright dorkfest.
That hurt me so much but I couldn’t quite understand why. I tried to hide it, but the one source of excitement and escape I’d experienced in the month since Dad died was shredded in an instant. I think that’s when I started building a wall up between us. They knew it too. Zoey was looking at me with those squinted dissecting eyes that she gives anybody that’s in any way different, different being the worst possible offence in the world to her. They didn’t know why, they never thought that the emotional impact of what I’d just gone through was going to change not just me for a few weeks, but the very core of me for ever. They just thought living in the country was having a bad effect on me. But I’d been trampled on like a plant that has been crushed underfoot but not killed, and just like the plant I’d no choice but to grow in a different direction than I had before.
When Zoey grew bored, or scared, of discussing things she knew nothing of, she called Fiachrá Garóand the third muskateer, Colm, who I call Cabáte—which means ‘cabbage’ in Irish. I’d never ever spoken to him properly in my life. Zoey paired off with Garóid, Fiachrá was partnered with Laura, which Zoey had seemed to have got over, and Cabáiste and I just sat and watched the sea, while the other four rolled around in the sand making sloppy noises, and Cabáiste glugged occasionally on a nagin of vodka, and I expected to be groped at any moment. He covered the bottle with his mouth and knocked back another mouthful, and I waited for that wet, sloppy, vodka-tasting kiss that slightly stung and made me want to retch at the same time.
But he didn’t do that.
‘Sorry about your dad,’ he said quietly.
His comment took me by surprise and then suddenly I became so emotional I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t answer him, I couldn’t even look at him. I looked the other way and allowed the breeze to blow my hair across my face, hiding and sticking to the hot tears that rolled down my cheeks.
The fact I’d been trampled on was obvious. What I called into question time and time again was which direction I was now growing in.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Secret Garden
Whenever I left home for a longer length of time than usual, say to go on a school trip abroad, or when I went on shopping trips to London with friends, I always used to bring something with me to remind me of home—just something small. One Christmas we were at a buffet in a hotel and my dad stole a little plastic penguin that was sitting on top of a pudding and he put it in my dessert. He was trying to be funny but I was having one of those days, which was much like most days, where nothing he said or did could possibly be conceived of as funny, and so somehow the penguin ended up in my pocket that day. Then months later, when I was away, I put my hand in my pocket and found the little penguin, and laughed. Dad’s joke, though months way too late and not in his presence, I finally found funny. Somehow on that trip, it ended up in my washbag, and it travelled the world with me.
You know one of those things that you only have to look at and it instantly connects you to something else? I’m not a sentimental person; I never felt that attached to anything or anyone at home. Not like some people, who just have to look at something, like even a piece of fluff, and it sends tears to their eyes because it vaguely reminds them of something somebody once said once upon a time at home, when hindsight, whispering into their ear like the devil, tells them they were happy. No, bringing something with me was just a little ammunition really, to make me feel like I wasn’t totally and utterly alone, that I had a little piece of home with me. Not sentimentality, just simple plain old insecurity.
I certainly wasn’t attached to the gatehouse in any way. I’d only been there for a couple of days but during my great escape to Zoey’s house, I brought the book I’d found in the travelling library with me. I still hadn’t managed to unlock it and I certainly had no intentions of reading it while I was there, not when they were so busy telling me about their new source of entertainment—wait for it—going out without underwear on. Honestly, I had to laugh. There was a photo of Cindy Monroe, a six-and-a-half-stone, five foot tall, American reality star, getting out of a car to go to a club the day of her release from forty-eight hours spent in gaol for drink-driving, and she wasn’t wearing any knickers. Zoey and Laura seemed to think this was a great new leap forward for women. I think that when the women’s lib took off their bras and burned them, this wasn’t exactly what they were hoping for. I said this to Zoey and she studied me thoughtfully, her eyes squinting almost closed like she was the Queen of Hearts about to decide whether to chant ‘Off with her head!’ or not. But then she opened her eyes wide and said, ‘No it’s fine, my top was totally backless so I couldn’t wear a bra either.’
Totally backless. Very dead. Another one of those phrases. It was either backless or it wasn’t. I’ve no doubt that it was.
Anyway, when I was sent away to Zoey’s house—‘sent away’ being the operative words—I felt like I’d been told to go sit on the naughty step to think about what I’d done. Despite the fact I should have felt that I was heading home, that I was heading towards feeling more whole again, I didn’t feel like it at all. And so, I brought a piece of the new world with me. I brought the book. I knew it was there in my bag when I was sleeping on the pull-out bed in Zoey’s room, and as we stayed up all night talking about everything, I knew that it was listening to me, this foreign thing from my detested new life, gaining an insight into the life I once had. I had a witness. I felt like telling it to go home and tell what my life used to be like to all the other things there that I loathed. The book felt like my little secret from Laura and Zoey, a pointless and boring one but a secret all the same, lying beside me in my overnight bag.
And so when Arthur’s Land Rover turned into the side entrance to Kilsaney Demesne, and I was gobbled up again by my new desperate non-life, I decided to take the book and go for a
walk with it. I knew it would kill Rosaleen if I didn’t arrive back and fill her in on the no-knickers-wearing trend, and as it was always my duty to punish, I set off. I also knew that Mum would still be in the same place, sitting in that rocking chair, not rocking, but I allowed my mind to pretend she was doing the exact opposite, like out in the garden doing naked pirouettes or something.
I’d never walked around the grounds before. To and from the castle, yes, but around the one hundred acres, no. All of my previous visits had been made up of tea and ham sandwiches in a quiet kitchen while Mum talked about things I didn’t care about with my strange aunt and uncle. I’d do anything—eat twenty sloppy egg sandwiches and two slices of whatever cake was going—to get out of that kitchen and wander in the front garden that wrapped its way around to the back. Nowhere else interested me. I wasn’t much of an explorer, anything that involved movement bored me. I was never intrigued enough by anything to take things that little bit further. On that day I still wasn’t, but I was bored and so I dumped my overnight bag, which Arthur snot-snorted at and brought into the house for me, and I was gone.