Behind him, as he moves away, he can hear the cousins whispering, conferring: ‘Is he crying?’ one of them says.
Is he? He’s aware that he’s moving unsteadily, that the ground is bucking beneath him. I am sleep-deprived, he wants to say, I am dehydrated, I am not myself, I am somewhat out of sorts, and four months ago my sister was in a drugstore with her friend when a masked teenager burst through the door and waved a gun in the air and told them all to get down on the floor and Phoebe, my sister, took longer to do this than everybody else because she had this problem with her back, so the kid shot her. He shot her through her head, her beautiful, clever head. And now her head doesn’t exist any more and neither does her back and neither does she.
He seems to have made contact with the ground. He can feel stones pushing up through the knees of his jeans, can smell the wet-earth scent of it. It seems to make sense to him. To be here, on the ground, in the rain.
They were buying lip gloss. This fact still makes him angry; it makes him furious. His sister died because she wanted some fucking lip gloss. Last week he went into the drugstore and stood in the place she’d died – he’d asked the police to show him exactly where – and then after a while he filled a basket with every tube of lip gloss they had and took it to the counter and paid for it, and then he had lit a fire in the sink at his apartment and thrown them in, one by one. He’d gone back the next day and done the same and then on the third day the security guard had barred his way and said he was not permitted entry. There had been a scene of sorts, with the police and then the head of his department and his mother was there too. So Niall had got out the piece of paper his father had given him at the funeral and booked a flight.
When things become clear again, it strikes him that he has never been in a room of this colour. He isn’t quite sure what colour it is: midway between green and blue and grey. It’s all three at once and yet none of them exactly. The ceiling has gold stars stuck to it. He is sitting in an enormous, sagging chair that seems to embrace him on three sides. Over his legs is a patchwork quilt: tessellated fabric hexagons of varying patterns but uniform size. There is a stove and next to it a nest of kittens stir and sigh around their striped-browed mother, who regards Niall with incurious yellow eyes.
A woman is moving about the other end of the room, arranging logs in a basket, pushing books into place on the shelves, setting the table, lifting a kettle from the range. Niall looks at the line of her jaw, the set of her hands, the braid of hair hanging down her back. She is dressed in a man’s shirt with a cardigan over it, a pair of reading glasses pushed to the top of her head. Even though he has known for some time whom his father married, it is quite something to see her here in the flesh, no longer young, but still unmistakably her, still unmistakably in existence.
‘It’s the invisible woman,’ he says.
She turns her head to look at him. After a moment, she smiles. She picks up a tray and comes towards him. Really, it’s uncanny, seeing her like this. Niall saw one of her films only a few months ago: he had streamed it to his laptop, one rainy Sunday afternoon when nothing much was happening, in that strange, distant, inaccessible time before life caved in on him.
She sets down the tray and hands him a cup. ‘Apple tea,’ she says. She gives him a plate. ‘Drop scone.’
Niall holds these things in his hands for a moment, transfixed by their ordinariness and simultaneous strangeness. Who has plates with the faint outlines of unicorns and dragons just discernible along their chipped edges? Is it possible to drink something as ordinary as tea from a cup that looks as though it belongs in a museum, with a gilded edge, a delicate handle in the shape of a peacock’s tail? What is a drop scone, anyway?
Then he gulps down the tea, as if it is the first thing he’s drunk all day. Which, he reflects, it might be. She lifts the cup from his hand and refills it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, while chewing the drop scone, which turns out to be a kind of smallish pancake with butter on it. ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing here. My dad told me at the funeral that if I was ever in trouble, I should come here, I should just show up and –’
‘I’m glad he did.’
‘– he drew me a map and everything. I had no idea you and he weren’t together any more. He never said. I would never have come. I mean, I have no right, under the circumstances, really, I just—’
‘Sssh,’ Claudette Wells says. ‘Eat.’
‘I didn’t mean to frighten your daughter, or your niece. I only—’
She shakes her head, cutting him off. ‘It takes a lot more than that to frighten Marithe and Zhilan. They are both made of fairly stern stuff.’
‘The thing is … the thing is … she … Marithe, I mean … she looks so like …’ Niall finds he can’t go on.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know she does.’ She puts down her own cup – a thing of turquoise china with interlocking green leaves – and leans forward. ‘Niall, I am so sorry about what happened to your sister. I can’t imagine what you must be going through. How much you must miss her.’
Niall cannot open his mouth, he cannot trust himself to speak. He finds he is weeping, which is odd, because he very rarely weeps. His mother always said that he was a freakishly silent baby, that he never cried. The number of times he’s cried in his life could be counted on his fingers. He didn’t even cry at Phoebe’s funeral, which is odd, really, but then Niall has always known he was odd, in many ways.
Claudette has taken his hand in hers, she has her fingers wrapped around his bandages. ‘Stay,’ she is saying, ‘for as long as you need. You are very welcome here.’
Niall looks out of the window and sees the side of a mountain. He can read rock formation the way some people can read text at a glance and he knows just by looking at it that it is quartzite. At the base of this mountain, he can see children, his half-siblings among them, and their cousin, running back and forth with sticks. There must be some point, some edict to the game, but Niall cannot, for the moment, see what it is. There are children, there is yelling, there are sticks and there is a ball, or perhaps two. They run, oblivious to the rain, from one tree to the next, and their cries stretch out to him, sitting in the grey-green room, as if on elastic.
Niall does what he always does in times of stress: he enumerates known elements of his situation, concrete facts. One: he is sitting in a room in a house that doesn’t even have a street address, surrounded by people he has never met. Two: there is an incomprehensible game going on beyond the window, played by children with whom he shares DNA. Three: his father, both hero and demon of his life, has done another of his Houdini escapes. Here is another house in which his father, Daniel, is absent yet present. That coat behind the door, those linguistics and psychology books on the shelves, those auburn-haired children through the window. Four: he has no return flight to the States as he’d had insufficient funds in his checking account for anything other than a one-way ticket. He could, he had reasoned at the ticket desk, sort something out later. Five: he knows precisely no one in this country, now that he has learnt that his father no longer lives here. Six: a vanished movie star sits beside him, holding his hand.
Niall inclines his head at the woman and the movement causes the plate in his lap to slide to one side. The dragons and unicorns tilt into the light, they are suddenly illuminated with sun, their worn edges flaring, sparking, lit into life, like phosphorescence, like magic.
Absolutely the Right Tree
Claudette and Daniel, Donegal and London, 2013
Claudette stands in the window of her bedroom, looking down at the gravel where the car is usually parked.
She is looking without seeing. She doesn’t see the tyre-swing, oscillating by a quarter-circle and back; she doesn’t see the surface of the pond, broken here and there by alabaster spikes of water-lilies; she doesn’t see the jay fling itself from lawn to sky.
The morning is cool, with mist hanging low over the valley, but the sun may break through the moist
ure later. It may. Even now it will be shining down on the clouds; it may come streaming through towards the earth at any minute.
Claudette is thinking of many things as she stands at her window. Some are mundane: that the bed needs making, the kitchen tidying, the dogs walking, the wood chopping. Other threads weaving through her head are more abstract: that time in Kerala, when she bought those leather slippers she used to love, how hot it was, what damp heat, how vibrant the colours of the spices along that street, kept there in hessian sacks, great heaps of saffron and cumin and turmeric, the air heavy with their scent. And: will the weather where the children are be wet like this or will it be warm? Hard to know. And: that shirt of Daniel’s, the one he had when she first knew him, the same blue of the walls of the spice street in Kerala, a denser blue than that of a cloudless sky, the faded fabric at the neck, at his cuffs, the way he always—
Claudette twists away from the window, sets herself in motion, picks up clothes from the floor of her bedroom blindly, tossing them to the bedstead, not even caring when they slide once more to the floorboards. She seizes a hairbrush from her dressing-table and, dragging it downwards through her hair, sets off for the stairs.
It’s the first time the children have been away, she’s telling herself as she goes down, the first time you’ve ever been without them. The hairbrush catches on a snarl and she winces. The first time. It’s bound to feel strange.
Hundreds of miles south-west, in London, at exactly the same moment, Daniel is lying on his side, in bed. He is watching the red digital numbers of his alarm clock mutate into their successors. ‘5’ gains an extra descender on its lower left corner to become ‘6’; to become ‘7’, the ‘6’ must lose almost all of itself, all its left-hand side, all its lower and middle strokes; the only consolation, he tells the ‘6-soon-to-be-7’ is that you’ll get them all back for the full house that is ‘8’.
He watches the numbers tot themselves up, then spill over into another hour. ‘00’ shows itself in the minute section, which is Daniel’s least-favourite digital configuration, and the radio sparks into life. A voice is telling him that it’s seven a.m. exactly and that he is about to hear the news. There are the chimes of Big Ben, there are the weird beeps – ‘the pips’, Claudette taught him to call them, which always made him think of the interior of apples, those mahogany-shiny seeds – and so begins another morning in London, another working day.
Not, however, Daniel thinks, as he turns over, pulling the covers over his head, for him.
In the living room, Claudette searches for a box of matches with which to light the stove, running her hand along the mantelpiece.
She hadn’t been sure it was the right thing to do, to allow Niall to take Marithe and Calvin to see the Giant’s Causeway. Was Calvin too young to be away from home and was Niall up to the sole charge of his two energetic half-siblings and would Marithe get car-sick? Last night, though, on the phone, they had sounded buoyant, excited, thrilled with the youth hostel and its bunks, its strict meal times, its lists of rules; Niall had said everything was fine, everyone was doing great, she mustn’t worry.
She comes upon the matches, hidden beneath a book, and is just sliding them into her dressing-gown pocket when she is hit by a thought. Is this the first time she has ever spent a night alone in this house? Could it be? She stares at the windows, the walls, the chinoiserie curtains with the lonely woman on her bridge, forever waiting for her man to turn up.
It must be. In all the permutations of people who have lived in the house, in her time, not once has she been here alone. First, there was her and Ari, then her and Ari and Daniel, then Marithe arrived, then Calvin, then Ari left, for school, then university. And then – Claudette makes herself think this, it is good for her, part of the process of facing up to what happened, to accepting it, to moving on – and then, of course, Daniel left. The house lost Daniel.
Claudette crams kindling and firewood into the mouth of the stove, shoves it all in together, in a haphazard, disordered heap, seeing her life stream before her as a series of mathematical formulae. Her + Timou = Ari. Her + Daniel = Marithe + Calvin. Her – Daniel = this. Whatever this is. Being solitary, in a state of undress, making a mess of lighting a fire.
She slams the stove door shut, furious with herself, with the tears that are inexplicably stinging her eyes, furious with the stove, which is refusing to catch, furious with everything, furious with her husband, estranged husband, former husband, whatever he is, who lost his way in life so badly that the only option for them was to—
Claudette refuses to allow herself to finish that thought. Why today, of all days, is Daniel invading her head? It’s been almost two years, for God’s sake, since he left, which is surely more than enough time to get over a man.
The next thing to happen, in the mathematical scheme of things, she supposes, as she fumbles to light another match, is that Marithe and Calvin will leave. They will grow up, they will go, and then what will happen? Will she live here, at the top of the valley, alone? The children will visit, of course, but how will she survive, on her own, in this place?
Claudette, with a kind of growl, flings the box of matches across the room. She kicks the door of the stove shut – who needs a fire anyway? – and stomps towards the kitchen.
She opens and shuts cupboards at random. You need, she tells herself, to stop this. Enough. What is wrong with you? You’re alone in the house, for God’s sake. It’s not the end of the world – why can’t you just make the most of it?
Claudette takes the lid off the kettle, carries it to the sink but leaves it there without filling it.
In the bathroom, Daniel avoids his eye in the mirror. He spends a great deal of time avoiding mirrors. Overrated things at the best of times.
Only when he has swung open the bathroom cabinet does he look up. His fingers stray through the contents of the shelves. Soaps, shampoos, shaving gear, medication – some over-the-counter, some prescription – deodorant, mouthwash, and right at the back he finds a small, amber-coloured bottle. Daniel lifts it out and considers it, frowning. It’s some miscellaneous homeopathic stuff and he has no idea how it got there because it isn’t the kind of thing he pisses away his money on. It must, he thinks, date from Claudette’s time. He should get around to chucking it out one of these days: hadn’t he told her often enough that homeopathy was a shameful scam? Not that she’d ever listened, of course.
Daniel presses two painkillers from their foil into his palm and swings the cabinet shut. A momentary flash of a grizzled, semi-bearded, whey-faced ogre passes over his vision but he closes his eyes just in time. What in the world is that monster doing in his bathroom, and when will that guy take his leave?
He gropes, eyes still closed, for the tap and turns it on. He tosses the painkillers to the back of his tongue and bends to suck water from the tap. It hits his lips and teeth with an icy punch.
‘Urgh,’ he hears himself say. ‘Aaaah.’
Wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve, Daniel makes his way along the corridor and into the living room. He sits himself carefully on the couch. A headache like this requires gentle handling, special treatment. Sudden movements are out of the question, as are loud noises, even speech. The pain, which began life in the cerebellum area, is now spreading its fingers along the sides of his skull to press at his temples.
He directs his gaze out of the window where, over the leafless bushes of the communal mansion-block garden, he can see windows identical to his, all stacked on top of each other. That was what he had found most unsettling about London, when he moved here – how crammed in everyone was, the lack of room between living spaces, the airlessness, the feeling that always, wherever you were, whatever you were doing, someone was watching you with detached, impersonal eyes. And him a New Yorker! He had chided himself for feeling such claustrophobia, for the loss of his city legs. Those years of living in the wilds of Donegal had done him in, ruined him, spoilt him, in perhaps more ways than one.
H
is gaze drops to the wall and to his photographs of Phoebe. He is collating them, collecting them, trying to find at least one for each year she was alive, which is no mean feat given that he didn’t see her between the ages of six and sixteen and how that lost decade gnaws at him, enrages him, especially in the dead of night.
He sees, as he looks at them, that the photograph of her, aged eight, given to him by Niall, has slipped slightly.
Daniel is out of his seat and across the room in seconds, easing the picture off the wall, finding a length of fresh tape, affixing it back to its rightful place, between a shot of her aged seven, with a gap-toothed smile and too-short bangs, and one aged nine, where she is gravely holding a resigned-looking rabbit in the backyard.
He retreats to the sofa, sits down. He allows himself to run the thought My daughter is dead through his head. He has to block images of drugstores, of youths in masks, of injuries, of his angel child sprawled across the floor. These are things he must not think about. He becomes conscious, as he concentrates on not picturing the moment of Phoebe’s death, something digging into his side, so he puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out the bottle of homeopathic medicine. He doesn’t remember putting it into his pocket but he must have done. How else could it have got there?
How come, Claudette thinks, there is nothing to eat in the whole house? How can this be? She extracts a box of muesli, contemplates the picture of a man gazing joyfully at a china bowl, puts it back. She picks up a loaf of bread. She puts it down. She yanks open the fridge to find an etiolated carrot, a hunk of spore-covered cheese, some curdled milk. How can there be nothing? Or nothing she feels like eating?
She pulls open a drawer, finds a collection of corn-on-the-cob holders, most of them broken, and tries to shut it again but finds that it is jammed. She shoves at it with her hip but something at the back is catching, preventing it from closing. She jiggles it towards her but it is now refusing to open so she snakes her hand into the hollow space to try to release whatever it is.